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About BeleniX and Background Notes
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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:
- An easily available OpenSolaris distribution is
needed to popularise OpenSolaris among the BIG Indian Open Source
community.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Team:
Moinak Ghosh (moinakg2002 (at) yahoo (dot) com) - Lead developer and
initiator.
Venkata Kishore
Sriram Popuri
Pradhap Devarajan
Gangadhar Mylapuram
Venkata Kishore
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.
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.
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