Belenix

From Genunix

BeleniX is a *NIX distribution that is built using the OpenSolaris source base. It is a live CD with option to install to the hard disk. BeleniX is a volunteer project intended to grow with community participation.It was initiated as a free time skunkworks project by a few geeky souls at the India Engineering Centre of Sun Microsystems in Bangalore, the silicon capital of India.

See the Contribute to Belenix link incase you are interested in contributing to the Belenix project.

Belenix has had multiple revisions till now, details of which are given below.

Contents

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About the current release

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Belenix V0.4.2 (April 09 2006)

From the main Belenix page:

It is is primarily a Bugfix release with a few software upgrades and boottime improvements. The details are as below:

  • The BeleniX FAQ is now online at the Genunix WIKI (http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Belenix_FAQ)
  • Fix the locale issue in BeleniX's Xorg 6.9 build. It was due to an improper cpp configuration in host.def
  • Modify openmotif to be more compatible with Solaris motif. Also included and rebuilt openmotif using Berkeley YACC.
  • Included libusb and libusbugen from the recently released SFW consolidation source code.
  • Fix some issues with the startkde and startxfce scripts
  • Harddisk install was broken again in 0.4.1. This was due to an improper configuration for the boot-archive service. This resulted in the boot archive not being generated after install. Though this issue had a workaround.
  • Included SVR4 Packaging tools (as in Solaris) so commands like pkgadd and pkgrm work.
  • Included a modified pkg-get script. This coupled with the SVR4 Packaging tools and a Solaris patch now allow Blastwave packages to work on BeleniX. See How do I manage packages for details.
  • Upgraded Firefox and Thunderbird to 1.5 release versions. The latest versions have some problems if compiled using gcc 3.4.3. Building using gcc 3.4.2 works fine.
  • Fix hdinstaller to generate mountpoint for /export/home instead of /home since on OpenSolaris /home is traditionally used by the automounter.
  • Update hdinstaller to allocate more space for /usr in the default auto-layout.
  • Fix hdinstaller to properly mount all additional mountpoints before performing the file copy.
  • Added the shared-mime-info package from freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/shared-mime-info. The absence of this was preventing Evince from working.
  • Added a default definition of XDG_DATA_DIRS so that gnome apps like evince can locate mime data and icons.
  • Disabled 4 more services (including a couple of nfs services) and changed the dependency of the xserver service, simplified some more services to improve boottime and reduce resource requirements.
  • Increased compression segment size to 128KB. This gives better compression ratio. Also improved preload performance by touching only one page in a compression segment which is enough to cache the entire 128KB segment. This reduces double-caching overhead. Since only one 8K page is touched, only one in 16 pages is double cached which is about 6% of the total. Thus this improves effectiveness of preloading in systems with less RAM.
  • Thanks to smbios Xorg GUI now works on the Ferrari 4000 laptop.
  • Fixed a panic on systems with PCI-X hotplugging. This was caused by a couple of missing kernel modules (pciehpc, gfx_private).

Known Issues:

Java 1.5 now works on BeleniX after adding the appropriate patch: refer to the "How do I manage packages" section in the Belenix FAQ. But the problem is that AWT/Swing is unstable. A GUI application exits with SIGTERM soon after starting up. This is being investigated.

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Belenix V0.4.1 (March 31 2006)

BeleniX 0.4.1 is now available with several additions/improvements:

  • Improved bootup time via a variety of mechanisms with further room for improvement in future. For full details see: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/moinakg/20060324
  • Upgraded to OpenSolaris build 34 and implemented almost complete Non-DEBUG build so the kernel is now leaner and meaner.
  • Improved Monitor auto-detection code esp for some flat-panel monitors like Laptop ones.
  • Added a bunch of new Software that includes Stefan Teleman's (http://www.kdedevelopers.org/blog/242) Port of K3b for Solaris, Cdrtools, KDE Educational Software, OpenMotif, more drivers from Masayuki Murayama etc.
  • Upgraded some existing software including various drivers and bugfixes.


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Belenix V0.4_a (March 03 2006)

The 0.4 release had a bug that broke the install to harddisk feature. 0.4 harddisk installs will be incomplete. Version 0.4_a has been released that fixes this issue.

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BeleniX V0.4 (alpha) (Feb 23 2006) (LiveCD + InstallCD)

This is a major new release featuring some significant additions listed below:

  1. Enhanced the lofi (loopback file device) kernel module to support on the fly decompression using zlib. This coupled with a utility to perform the compression now allows the /usr filesystem on the CDROM to be in compressed form.
  2. Maximum Zlib compression has allowed adding in 1.5 GB of software on the CD with room for more!
  3. Compression has also provided significant boottime reductions. The LiveCD can boot into an Xfce desktop in around 3 mins. You can see this if you execute "df -h" in a terminal window after booting into Xfce desktop.
  4. Includes the latest KDE 3.5.1 and Koffice 1.5 Beta with native OpenDocument support.
  5. Includes all of the GNOME base libraries.
  6. Includes other apps like Amarok music player, Evince document viewer, GIMP, Python, Mtools, Samba, BerkeleyDB, Graphviz (with Cairo integration), GnuPG, Quanta+, PostgreSQL, Xerces, Subversion, Kdevelop etc. In all about 234 software packages are present not counting the individual software in the KDE metapackages.
  7. QT has been built using libXft and freetype2 which adds support for Font Antialiasing in KDE and QT Applications.
  8. The iosnoop.d script from the DTrace Toolkit was used to analyse KDE and Xfce startup file access pattern. This has enabled file placement optimization using the "-sort" option to mkisofs to improve Xfce and KDE startup performance.
  9. The /root home directory is now mounted on tmpfs to avoid filling up limited space on the ramdisk.
  10. Reduced ramdisk size by moving some unneeded directories from /etc and moving some kernel modules (like audio drivers) from /kernel in the ramdisk to /usr/kernel in the CD. The ramdisk size is now around 55MB.
  11. Disabled startup of autofs to reduce startup overhead.
  12. Removed the automatic ramdisk caching mechanism that was in 0.3 . This caused some trouble on certain hardware.

Notes

The lofi patches will be posted in a few days. This release is still using OpenSolaris build 27 due to some hardware support issues with builds after 27. The next 0.4.1 release will however move to build 34.

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See Also

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Related Links

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