Solaris man uses a manual page index file called "windex" in place of the old "whatis" file. You can build this index with
catman -w -M <man-page-directory>
But, in 2.1, this will result in numerous "line too long" messages and a bogus windex file in /usr/share/man, and a core dump in /usr/openwin/man. (In 2.2, catman works in /usr/share/man, but says "line too long" in /usr/openwin/man). To add injury to insult, "man" normally won't show you a man page if it can't find the windex entry, even though the man page exists.
There's a "makewhatis" script in /usr/openwin/man that works better than catman. But watch it - by default it searches files in /usr/man, not in openwin, and it only looks in some predefined man subdirectories. Try changing its "for ..." command to "for i in man*", then use it like this: cd /usr/share/man; /usr/openwin/man/makewhatis . cd /usr/openwin/man; /usr/openwin/man/makewhatis .
Still (!), the openwin windex file is somewhat hosed (try "man answerbook" :-( ). You can always delete the bogus lines manually... or, you can alias man to "man -F", forcing it to look for the bloody file like you asked.
But wait, there's more! To see the read(2) man page, you can't just type "man 2 read" anymore - it has to be "man -s 2 read". Or, alias man to this little script:
#!/bin/sh if [ $# -gt 1 -a "$1" -gt "0" ]; then /bin/man -F -s $* else /bin/man -F $* fi