Do you recall the failure message? Did it fail on compilation? Hmm. If it didn't bomb out saying no packages were installed, I at least managed to fix part of the problem :-)
Do you have a /var/sadm/install/contents file? Should be a couple meg in size. Also, what is the result of pkginfo -x conf and pkgchk conf? The latter command may take some time to run.
If anything's causing it to fail, it probably would be that it is using gcc > 1.x to compile, or the conf package is installed incorrectly. Thanks a lot for giving this a shot, hopefully from here we can get it working...