BeleniX

Infobox OS
name = BeleniX


caption = Belenix logo
developer =
family = Unix
latest_release_version = 0.7.1
latest_release_date = July 19, 2008
kernel_type =
license = CDDL
working_state = In production|

BeleniX is an operating system distribution built using the OpenSolaris source base. It is primarily a Live CD but can be installed to hard disk. BeleniX was born out of the efforts of coders at the India Engineering Centre of Sun Microsystems in Bangalore, India. But it is community-maintained and has grown out of the efforts of many people, both Sun employees and not. It is one of the more significant FOSS efforts based in India.

The name is a reference to the Celtic god of light, Belenus. This is reflected in the distribution's logo.

It was originally planned for BeleniX to be a dual personality distro, one being Solaris compatible and one being a GNU userland over OpenSolaris. However the GNU/OpenSolaris personality has already been implemented via the Nexenta distribution of OpenSolaris. [ [http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=roadmap BeleniX RoadMap] ]

BeleniX aims to be an easy to use distribution that gently exposes the power of OpenSolaris. The current Live CD format makes OpenSolaris more easily approachable, and boots within three minutes from a CD-ROM. It also aims to encourage innovation by bringing in new features and usability enhancements and increasing community participation. There is a DVD edition too, since release 0.5.1, February 2007. It can also be installed to a USB Flash drive. [ [http://blogs.sun.com/dminer/entry/opensolaris_developer_preview_on_usb OpenSolaris Developer Preview on USB flash drives] ]

BeleniX was the second OpenSolaris distribution to appear, after SchilliX, and the first to provide an auto-configuring Xorg based GUI. It also introduced some missing technologies in OpenSolaris like readahead and I/O Scheduling in the ISO9660 filesystem (hsfs), transparent compression via loopback device (lofi) and DTrace based layout optimizations.

The Indiana project has leveraged many of these technologies and has served as a starting point for it. Taking this and other technologies developed for Indiana in account, the future focus for BeleniX has been set to evolve and grow as an Indiana derivate with focus a on the KDE desktop and make a fully featured and functional OpenSolaris based on KDE. [ [http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.solaris.opensolaris.indiana/832 Future of BeleniX Discussed on the mailing list] ] [ [http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=node/62 New Belenix Roadmap] ]

ee also

* OpenSolaris
* Nexenta, another operating system based on OpenSolaris
* SchilliX, another operating system based on OpenSolaris

References

External links

* [http://www.belenix.org/ BeleniX Home Page] "
*
* [http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Belenix_FAQ BeleniX FAQ on "Genunix OpenSolaris Wiki"]