Either use the extracted cds.tar.xz tarball or convert the bin files. Try CCD2ISO. Then you end up with images.dir/fs.N files. Most are gzipped tarballs, some are raw data. The hexdump shows these having a header with "install/pkgs/lib11.3-p01-inv" for example, or other package versioning. It seems these are inventory files for Cadence SoftLoad, but no machine can mount these bin files. If you want to extract the files yourself try 7za for all of them, then use a small python script to extract the filename for the ones that are not tarballs, since it always follows the pattern "install/pkgs/.inv". The fs.0 file seems a controller for SoftLoad. Once you extract the tarballs you get the Cadence applications, but no clues on installation. A source script is provided with some initial env vars, and the license file. The script is cds/start.sh Copy cadence.lic to your $CDS_ROOT/share/license/license.dat export LM_LICENSE_FILE=$CDS_ROOT/share/license/license.dat and serve the licenses with the included $CDS_ROOT/tools/bin/lmgrd the start.sh script provides a baseline. Starting dfII applications might require setting X permissions with: xhost + If you get errors about a missing libsunload.so library, the application is meant for SunOS 4.1.4. The libsunload.so library was not present in Solaris 2.x.