BeleniX

BeleniX is a *NIX distribution that is built using the OpenSolaris source base. It is currently a LiveCD distribution but is intended to grow into a complete distro that can be installed to hard disk. BeleniX has been developed out of Bangalore the silicon capital of India and it was born at the India Engineering Center of SUN Microsystems. It grew out of a variety of considerations:

1. An easily available OpenSolaris distribution is needed to popularise OpenSolaris among the BIG Indian Open Source community.
2. In interactions with the community, it was pointed out several times that a LiveCD initially and a full distro later on will go a long way in spreading OpenSolaris.
3. Official Solaris is now an Open OS. In fact it is a complete OpenSolaris distro that has lots of testing, stability etc. Many people will want to use this. However there are many folks in the OSS community: students, hackers, power users and professors who are qute interested in having a distro developed by the community for the community. They are always willing to try out bleeding edge stuff not bothering about stability etc. So, I developed BeleniX as community member in an attempt to meet this interest.
4. No technical documentation was available on how to go about building bootable LiveOS CDs for OpenSolaris, or even, what is required to have self-hosting pure OpenSolaris environment without depending on Solaris Express - This was the situation when I contemplated this project.
5. No open-source tools and scripts were available that enable people to easily build OSS packages on OpenSolaris and generate CD images as well - Again this situation existed when I began.

BeleniX was conceptualized and developed over a period of 3 months and it demonstrates the fact that Solaris is now a truely Open Source operating system.

Goals and Objectives

A short note on goals and obejctives is not out of place here. BeleniX is targeted as a community project where an attempt will be made to keep up to date with bleeding-edge stuff much like the Fedora project. So there are no gurantees on stability and testing - we expect feedback/help from the community to fix bugs/issues.

The other point is that BeleniX is a distro that uses the OpenSolaris codebase so development in BeleniX will augment OpenSolaris development. So fixes and enhancements to OpenSolaris code in BeleniX have to go back into OpenSolaris codebase. This is in the spirit of open-source and ensures that the benefits are shared by all.

Team

• Moinak Ghosh (moinakg2002 (at) yahoo (dot) com) - Lead developer and initiator.
• Venkata Kishore
• Sriram Popuri
• Pradhap Devarajan
• Gangadhar Mylapuram

Apart from the above I'd like to thank Hn Vijay and Prakash Jalan for providing a lot of support and access to their laptops for testing BeleniX during it's birth pangs.