BeleniX 0.5.1 review

BeleniX is an OS distribution based on OpenSolaris codebase

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 695200K Developer: Moinak Ghosh

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BeleniX is an OS distribution based on OpenSolaris codebase. At present BeleniX is a basic LiveCD distribution that boots directly off the CD into a multiuser shell. The name BeleniX is derived after the Sun God Belenos in Celtic Mythology (Do you read Asterix ?).

This distribution includes all the OpenSolaris bits in addition to other GNU/OSS software. At present the distro only supports 32 bit x86 platforms even though OpenSolaris supports AMD64 as well. Support for booting the LiveCD with AMD64 is in the works.

Here are some key features of "BeleniX":
Boots into a 32bit multiuser console login prompt. Support for GUI via Xorg and a desktop environment is coming shortly.
UserName: root, Password: belenix
It is based on the OpenSolaris build 20 source base.
Since it only boots into a shell without GUI, it can run in about 200MB RAM though a minimum of 256MB is good.
It will scan the harddisk for recognizable partitions and automatically mount them. This will Not mess with any data on the harddisk. This is basically a recovery feature.
It will try to use physical swap if the harddisk already has a formatted Solaris partition. This helps reduce RAM usage for swap.
It automatically starts DHCP and will configure DNS/NIS via the eventhook mechanism if the DHCP server supports it.
It allows the user to configure the Keyboard layout via a simple UI during bootup.
Uses a 60MB space optimised ramdisk for the root filesystem.

It includes various software packages like:

Dan Mick's prtpci script that dumps PCI info in human readable format. Somewhat like lspci in Linux.
Casper Dik's acpi, AMD powernow drivers and powernow utility for CPU frequency scaling.
Masayuki Murayama's open source network drivers.
Juergen Keil's audio drivers for Solaris.
Includes a Grub splash screen derived from one of Chandan's excellent collection.

Includes the following GNU/OSS software:

gcc 3.4, GNU assembler (from binutils)
Bison, Flex
GNU Gettext, Gmake, Gtar
Gzip and Bzip2
Less
Layer 4 Traceroute (an enhanced traceroute utility)
Libiconv, Libpcap, Ncurses
Lynx, Vim, Wget
Top process status utility
GNU Screen (Terminal Multiplexor)
The aperture driver which is required to eventually get X11 working on this distro.
Perl 5.8.4 which comes default with OpenSolaris
Fontconfig, Freetype2, Expat: These will be required by Xorg X11 server.
The FreeBSD math library ported to work with OpenSolaris. This is essential for a self-hosting OpenSolaris distribution