From Distrowatch.com: “BeleniX is the first live CD based on the OpenSolaris source base that boots into a full graphical desktop (with XFce). Developed at the India Engineering Centre of Sun Microsystems in Bangalore, BeleniX is trying to popularise OpenSolaris in the growing open source user and developer community in India and abroad.” OSDir provides the screenshots, as usual.
Announcing BeleniX LiveCD
About The Author
Adam Scheinberg
Technology Executive o Web Developer o Father o Foodie o Music Snob o OS enthusiast
Follow me on Mastodon @[email protected]
Great screen shots of the underlying OS. The blues and the sun really bring out the wonderful blues of the commandline.
On the plus side, it’s good to see more people using XFCE. It’s also pretty sweet that someone picked up the live CD idea. Solaris is a great OS to look at and say “Wow, that’s where that came from”. With this you can do it with out playing the “Is my hardware loved enough game”
Is there a torrent anywhere? I’ve been wanting to try OpenSolaris, and it’d be nice to try it with my favorite window manager, but it’s downloading really slow.
Nice indeed. It’s interesting the fact that it’s made by Sun itself, and they choose Xfce. Are they planning to dump Gnome? I hope so, Xfce it’s already much better in pretty much every area, all it needs to shine even more is some corporate money. Nice move.
Is there a reason I can’t reply to the ‘Wow’ post with a -4 score?
In any event, you people need to learn how to be objective. That post was neither a flame nor flamebait, and as such it should not be voted down. Just because you don’t happen to agree with his opinion (I don’t) doesn’t mean you have to vote it down. Some of you people need to grow up.
Nice indeed. It’s interesting the fact that it’s made by Sun itself, and they choose Xfce. Are they planning to dump Gnome? I hope so, Xfce it’s already much better in pretty much every area, all it needs to shine even more is some corporate money. Nice move.
-bytecoder
No, it was made as a side project by the Sun engineers in India. It’s not official.
I downloaded it last nite and it runs great on my dual P3 system. I tried it out on a Compaq Presario R3230US notebook and it began the boot process for about 3 seconds and then rebooted.
Does anyone know if it includes sun’s Java?
I’d like to know what the purpose to Solaris is really. From all I’ve read it can’t do anything more than Linux can (other than their so called containers which sound more like another way of multi-threading to me).
It has less hardware support, doesn’t improve on power management any (which means its useless for notebooks) which tells me its simply another server OS which doesn’t need a GUI anyway. So I’m /confused over it.
Try a 30 second google search.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=solaris+containers&btnG=Se…
I know I’m probably feeding the troll but as someone who has used Solaris since it first came out (and SunOS years before that) and Linux since before most present Linux users ever heard of it (anyone else remember SLS and MCC distros? ka9q networking? having to recompile the kernel for SCSI support?) I’m in a pretty good position to comment.
Every system has it strengths and weaknesses. Linux can usually be hammered and tweeked into working but whenever you are doing any non-trivial thing with there are always hurdles. Yes knocking over these hurdles is good fun and I’ve done my share of it. While Linux usually requires a some hackery to get rolling 90% of the time Solaris just works (though this wasn’t true in the wooly Solaris 2.0-2.4 days but I was mostly running SunOS 4.1 until 2.5.1 came out).
Then there is the issue of support. We buy Redhat because having a company behind our Linux gives managers the warm and fuzzy’s but Redhat support rarely solves any problems; If there is a solution to a problem I can’t figure out I’m much more likely to find it on the web on my own. Sun isn’t great because your problem has to bounce up the foodchain a few times but eventually you get ahold of someone who knows their stuff who can get you back on your feet.
Interesting reply, I’ll add to your point about support. When it comes to support even the Redhat support in terms of bugzilla is available to anyone. I can not say the same for Solaris. sunsolve is for subscribers only, I tried the solaris forum but thought to myself I know much better.
Two classical problems which I spent hours on
1. gcc path
2. Get my nvidia X config
And I wonder, if Solaris Express does not include a compiler & they have Solaris companion CD. Why do they do a half ASS job of giving the solaris companion CD if they can’t set the path’s right as part of the installation. You wonder what is behind the fancy java gui which all it does it extracts the files in /opt/sfw.
Solaris license is not GNU so it can include closed source device drivers. Why do we have the nv driver and not the latest nvidia driver. You read the news for collaboration of Sun and NVidia, what came out of that.
Well I’m not a troll anon, I’m a regular around here and unlike you I use my user ID which should also indicate that I’m not a troll.
To the others, especially John Blink who gave the only useful answer so far I thank for your information and time. It still seems to be simply a server OS capable of running Linux programs in this newer version of multithreading that they call “containers” though. But that is entirely conjecture as an outsider looking in. I’d have to read much more about it and actually see its uses for myself to understand it probably.
Rob
I have to agree with those that say/think that it’s nice to se Xfce integrated with Solaris. A light and fairly popular X window manager, why not? That said, I am more of a KDE guy, but I think the JDS Gnome looks really nice, and expecially highly usable.
I am downloading Belanix ISO as I am typing this. Will report back as soon as I’ve booted from the live CD.
As an offshoot of the opensolaris efforts, I expect the installation of Solaris becoming much smoother.
What package management system is it using? I really want to try a Soalris based system…. but not until I can get a good well tested package manager with a large collection of tested ports. Debian for Solaris would be nice.
Then your key to happiness is the Blastwave packages:
http://www.blastwave.org
Its a nice package manager and does everything you’d like from a package manager.
when it boots i try to get it to start x but it picks a resolution that my monitor cant handle. so how can i make it boot with like 1024x768x32 instead?
From the command line: kdmconfig. Xsun is default and easiest to configure, unless you want to do Xorg by hand.
Linux and KDE ?
… No, OpenSolaris and XFCE !
I just looked at some of the screenshots, the Live Cd looks good. How is the hardware support for typical DEll/IBM/Compaq laptop hardware? This might be useful fo demoing. Also can people outside of sun join this project ?
-> Vinayak Hegde
Yes. It is an opensource effort. They are actually looking for outside participation.
I don’t use software from the companion CD. I assemble my own packages or download them from sunfreeware.
I’ve had a sunsolve login forever but out of curiosity I went to sunsolve to see what I could get to without logging in. It looks like pretty much everything. I did have to accept their terms but after that I could lookup and download patches, search their knowledgebase, download utilities etc. There may be some areas that you can’t reach without a login but it looks like all the main stuff is available to anyone. I know you used to need a sunsolve account tied to a valid and current support contract to get in but now sunsolve seems to be open to all so try it again if you haven’t lately.
One of the things I think is interesting is that you can legally download Solaris 10 for free but you can’t legally download RHEL 4 without paying for it. In order to get a free version of RHEL you have to turn to compiling it from source yourself or someone else who has done it for you (e.g. CentOS).
For the most part X is not an issue for me. We run ser vers so we generally don’t run X on Solaris or Linux. I really don’t like KDE, Gnome, JDS, CDE or any other bloated WM. I usually fire up XFCE when I run X but to me even it is more than I need.
“I’ve had a sunsolve login forever but out of curiosity I went to sunsolve to see what I could get to without logging in. It looks like pretty much everything.”
You can only download security updates from sunsolve without a Sun support contract. For anything else you need to pay Sun some $$.
IMO Sun has really blown it with some of their more recent moves. Limiting access to sunsolve, going with the CDDL license versus LGPL or BSD license, etc. They could have won over some major converts if they had played it right but they didn’t. I still love Solaris (there is no better server OS) but Sun could have really cashed in on some of these moves by doing things differently. Hopefully they will learn from their mistakes and correct them in the future.
> You can only download security updates from sunsolve
> without a Sun support contract. For anything else
> you need to pay Sun some $$.”
Funny, I’m on looking at Sun’s Knowledgebase, System Handbook, Support Forums, Documentation, management tools, and Patches (including general ones) without logging in. The login window does mention that more stuff is avilable to Sun support customers but a lot is available to anyone with a web browser.
> IMO Sun has really blown it with some of their more
> recent moves. Limiting access to sunsolve, going with
> the CDDL license versus LGPL or BSD license, etc.
Sun can’t put UNIX source code under GPL or BSD licenses because they don’t own it. Sun’s UNIX
license is more liberal than most because of their
past cosy relationship with AT&T but even they are
not at liberty to sublicense SVR4 code this way.
> They could have won over some major converts if they
> had played it right but they didn’t.
Whatever, you criticize Sun for not relicensing SVR4 code when they couldn’t legally do anyway and you criticize them for not opeining Sunsolve which they have done but you simply are not aware of it.