BeleniX

News and Reviews on BeleniX

Belenix 0.4.3 released !

May 11 2006

A new release of the LiveCD is available. This is a major performance upgrade and has several fixes as listed below.

1. Upgraded to the OpenSolaris build 38.
2. Developed a new file sorting algorithm to process the DTrace output. This has resulted in boot time reductions of upto 20 seconds. The algorithm tries to identify contention regions using a sliding window mechanism and arranges file data to be placed closes to those regions. More details at Moinak's Blog
3. Changed the dependency of Xserver to now wait for sshd to complete loading. As both Xserver and sshd do some heavy I/O at startup they were competing for CDROM access (as per the DTrace output). This change has reduced boot time by upto 20 seconds as Xorg configuration now completes much faster.
4. Disabled the check for udfs mounts during boot as udfs heuristics tends to read a big amount of data from the device.
5. Updated the sort list to reflect initial files being loaded and added preload to load the initial dialog executable and associated libncurses binaries. #3 and #4 together has reduced boot time by about 5 seconds.
6. Fixed some installer bugs.
7. Fixed a warning about missing gld_debug debug variable during boot: Bug #523
8. Fixed a sound issue when running SuperTux for the first time. Often there will be no sound in this case: Bug #527
9. Fixed a problem in the /usr/lib/lu/lucreatezone script that prevented zones from being created: Bug #511
10. Fixed a minor nit with the DTrace guide where the widgets did not auto- resize if the window was resized. Since this is intended to be a dialog window the main window has now been made non-resizable: Bug #526
11. A new Grub Boot option to boot with Debug and Verbose mode enabled.
12. Rebuilt the Xserver with ThreadedX enabled. This solves a few problems including the ability to run Java 1.5. So now if BeleniX is installed to harddisk and the patchlibC step documented in Question #1 of the BeleniX FAQ is performed, the JDK 1.5 can be installed and will execute just fine.

Added the following new software:

1. Digikam, a KDE application to access digital cameras via USB and manipulate the images. The dependencies like libkipi, libgphoto2 and sqlite have also been added.
2. Kompose, a full screen task switcher for KDE.
3. A man enhancement that now displays Bold and Underlined text in the man command in OpenSolaris. This is Courtesy of Tim Cook

BeleniX LiveCD 0.4.2 released !

April 09 2006

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

1. Fix the locale issue in BeleniX's Xorg 6.9 build. It was due to an improper cpp configuration in host.def
2. Modify openmotif to be more compatible with Solaris motif. Also included and rebuilt openmotif using Berkeley YACC.
3. Included libusb and libusbugen from the recently released SFW consolidation source code.
4. Fix some issues with the startkde and startxfce scripts
5. 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.
6. Included SVR4 Packaging tools (as in Solaris) so commands like pkgadd and pkgrm work.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Fix hdinstaller to generate mountpoint for /export/home instead of /home since on OpenSolaris /home is traditionally used by the automounter.
10. Update hdinstaller to allocate more space for /usr in the default auto-layout.
11. Fix hdinstaller to properly mount all additional mountpoints before performing the file copy.
12. Added the shared-mime-info package from freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/shared-mime-info. The absence of this was preventing Evince from working.
13. Added a default definition of XDG_DATA_DIRS so that gnome apps like evince can locate mime data and icons.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. Thanks to smbios Xorg GUI now works on the Ferrari 4000 laptop.
17. 18. 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 How do I manage packages. But the problem is that AWT/Swing is unstable. A GUI application exits with SIGTERM soon after starting up. This is being investigated.

BeleniX LiveCD 0.4.1 released !

March 30 2006

1. Improved bootup time via a variety of mechanisms with further room for improvement in future. For full details see: The BeleniX LiveCD Performance Story
2. Upgraded to OpenSolaris build 34 and implemented almost complete Non-DEBUG build so the kernel is now leaner and meaner.
3. Added Stefan Teleman's Port of K3b for OpenSolaris.
4. Improved Monitor auto-detection code esp for some flat-panel monitors like Laptop ones.
5. New wallpapers for both Xfce and KDE.
6. Upgraded existing drivers and added new Network drivers from Masayuki Murayama.
7. Added 2 more games: Heroes and Lbreakout2.
8. Added other software like KDE Educational software suite, Cdrdao, Cdrtools, Nasm, Multitail, OpenMotif, HTML Tidy, Numeric Python.
9. Fixed a problem with some Gimp plugins being corrupted.
10. Fixed the Xorg Display issue on Microsoft Virtual PC.
11. Power management for AMD now works again.
12. Added the missing isnand function to the Math Library.

BeleniX LiveCD 0.4_a Bugfix Release

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.

Lofi compression docs and sources available

March 02 2006

The source code for the compression support in lofi and associated utilities is available along with documentation.

For documentation see: http://www.belenix.org/compression.html
Source code can be downloaded from: http://sarovar.org/download.php/940/clofi.tgz

The tarball includes a README and Makefile. The file "/lib/svc/method/fs-root" can be seen after booting into BeleniX as an example of the usage.

BeleniX LiveCD 0.4(alpha) released !

February 23 2006

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 . 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 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.

BeleniX LiveCD 0.3 released !

December 18 2005

A new version of the LiveCD has been released containing several new software packages and several enhancements. The highlights of this new release are mentioned below:

1. This release features a Perl-Curses based Hard Disk installer (hdinstaller utility) that can dump the contents of the CD to a Solaris2 partition. It allows one to partition the harddisk setup Solaris slices and also does basic configuration like setting hostname and root password. Writing an installer is non-trivial and this was contributed by Sriram Popuri. See the Documentation page for more info on the installer.
   
2. Enhancements to speed up the booting process. Enhancements have been done to speed up booting both in the generic case and also in the case where more RAM is available. Having more RAM gives the biggest reduction in boottime.
3. This release is based on OpenSolaris build 27 and includes the new 128 bit ZFS filesystem
4. Some insecure inetd services like ftp, telnet had been enabled in the earlier release. These have been disabled now.
5. Included a very minimal package file registry in /pkgs to support an ISO remastering tool.
6. A missing driver in earlier releases caused Creative SB audio cards to Not work. This has been fixed.
7. Included the ae driver from Masayuki Murayama and available from the SchilliX (OpenSolaris distro) page so the network now works in Vmware.
8. Fixed a few bugs in the Zone creation support script.

Other new software included in this release:

1. Included various Wireless drivers and the wificonfig tool available from the laptop community download page. See the laptop community page for more details.
2. Included the Cardbus driver available from the laptop community page.
3. Included a Network configuration GUI called inetmenu available from the laptop community page. Go to Xfce Panel -> Network Setup or execute inetmenu from a terminal window.
4. Netpbm 10.30, Midnight Commander 4.6.1
5. Xscreensaver 4.23, GDB 6.4, Gprof
6. Upgraded Juergen Keil's audio drivers to version 1.9 Beta
7. Upgraded Xfce to 4.2.3
8. Dialog 1.0-20051207
9. Included the SVR4 packaging tools released via the OpenSolaris tools community. This will allow one to install more packages in BeleniX once it is installed to harddisk.
10. Included the Devpro Make and SCCS tools from the OpenSolaris tools community.

Known Issues:

1. The installer does not yet provide the option to install GRUB in either MBR or Solaris partition. Currently it just installs in MBR.
2. While booting with network connected in a NIS environment, DHCP is configured but NIS domain is not bound correctly which results in a inetd hang and Xfce does not start. The workaround is to boot without the cable connected and later reconnect cable and execute "ifconfig <intf> dhcp start" or execute inetmenu to auto-configure the network.
   

NOTE: OpenSolaris Build 27 onwards includes crypto stuff. Please read the note on OpenSolaris Download page before downloading.

BeleniX LiveCD 0.2.1 released !

November 25 2005

This is primarily a BugFix release with a few new utilities.
Issues that were fixed:

1. Due to some missing files Thunderbird did not work in 0.2 release.
2. The 0.2 release still showed the version number as 0.1. This release will correctly display the version number
3. The Reboot and Shutdown options in XFce logout dialog were grayed out due to improper permissions of the /etc/sudoers file.

The following new utilities are added

1. Added a Volume Control/mixer utility and an icon to the panel
2. Added a command line utility "audioctl" (see man audioctl) to control master volume.
3. Added a GUI utility to list,start,stop and view details of the SMF services (or daemons). Select "Services" from the pop-up menu or execute zsvcadm from the command line.
4. Added the DTrace Toolkit which is a collection of useful DTrace scripts and documentation. Select "DTrace Toolkit Guide" from the pop-up menu to browse the docs.

NOTE: The BeleniX project is looking for participation/ volunteers. Please contact if you are interested.

BeleniX LiveCD 0.2 released !

October 29 2005

Version 0.2 of BeleniX has been released and it is now a LiveCD that can boot into a Graphical XFce4 desktop and provides a bunch of useful applications. There has been several enhancements and fixes. The earlier assertion failure has been rectified. Following are some of the new features:

1. The major feature of this release is the option to boot into a Graphical XFce4 desktop as well as the option to boot into a command line login.
2. Once booted it is possible to switch between GUI and commandline modes.
3. The ability to create Zones using a Perl script. This is a very simple and brain-dead script that tries to make "zoneadm -z install" work and creates a working zone. This script (/usr/bin/createzone) is invoked automatically by zoneadm and has not been tested much. So it will probably have a bunch of bugs.
4. New Grub Splash screen and wallpaper based on logo at the top of this Page. As usual this was contributed by Chandan.
5. It attempts to auto-configure Xorg based on the ddcxinfo utility ported from KnoppiX
6. Improvements to the Math Library required to build some of the software. Almost all open-source software can now be built on BeleniX using the bundled gcc 3.4.
7. Basic support for network profiles which allows easy network configuration without the need to reboot.
8. Option to boot into Non-Acpi mode as Acpi may unsettle the kernel (b20) on some machines.

The following are some of the software packages that have been added:

1. Xorg 6.9 (CVS)
2. XFce 4.2.0
3. Firefox 1.5 Beta 2, Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 2
4. Gaim 1.5.0
5. ImageMagick 6.2.5
6. Darren Moffat's Network Profile Switcher
7. SDL 1.2.9, Gtk+ 2.8.6, Glib 2.8.3, atk-1.10.3
8. SDL Based game SuperTux 0.1.3
9. Glitz 0.4.4
10. Cairo 1.0 with Glitz backend
11. Pango 1.10.1 with Cairo support
12. Fontconfig 2.3.2, Freetype 2.1.10
13. Expat 1.95.8, Flex 2.5.4
14. Image libraries: Png, Tiff, Jpeg
15. SVG library, librsvg 2.12.6, GD 2.0.28
16. Xmms 1.2.10, Ogg 1.1.2, Vorbis 1.1.0, Speex 1.1.8, Flac 1.1.2, Audiofile 0.2.6, Libao 0.8.6
17. Sudo 1.6.8p9, Vim 6.4
18. Garret D'Amore's Network Drivers
19. Tcl/Tk 8.4.11
20. Cscope 15.5, CVS 1.12.13
21. CUPS 1.1.23

Known Issues:

1. SMF display an odd PID/contract not found message on the console.
2. Audio does not work in SuperTux
3. OpenSolaris Build 20 was used for this release. This release has a bug that may cause a panic on Non-Acpi machines. The workaround is to select the Non-Acpi boot option in the Grub Menu. This bug has been fixed in later OpenSolaris builds.

Announcing BeleniX LiveCD version 0.1

October 04 2005

BeleniX is an OS distribution that uses the OpenSolaris codebase. This release 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. Following are some of the salient features:

1. Boots into a 32bit multiuser console login prompt. Support for GUI via Xorg and a desktop environment is coming shortly.
2. UserName: root, Password: belenix
3. It is based on the OpenSolaris build 20 source base.
4. Since it only boots into a shell without GUI, it can run in about 200MB RAM though a minimum of 256MB is good.
5. 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.
6. It will try to use physical swap if the harddisk already has a formatted Solaris partition. This helps reduce RAM usage for swap.
7. It automatically starts DHCP and will configure DNS/NIS via the eventhook mechanism if the DHCP server supports it.
8. It allows the user to configure the Keyboard layout via a simple UI during bootup.
9. Uses a 60MB space optimised ramdisk for the root filesystem.

It includes various software packages like:

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

Includes the following GNU/OSS software:

1. gcc 3.4, GNU assembler (from binutils)
2. Bison, Flex
3. GNU Gettext, Gmake, Gtar
4. Gzip and Bzip2
5. Less
6. Layer 4 Traceroute (an enhanced traceroute utility)
7. Libiconv, Libpcap, Ncurses
8. Lynx, Vim, Wget
9. Top process status utility
10. GNU Screen (Terminal Multiplexor)
11. The aperture driver which is required to eventually get X11 working on this distro.
12. Perl 5.8.4 which comes default with OpenSolaris
13. Fontconfig, Freetype2, Expat: These will be required by Xorg X11 server.
14. The FreeBSD math library ported to work with OpenSolaris. This is essential for a self-hosting OpenSolaris distribution
15. Perl-Ncurses interface and widget libraries (Curses-1.12, Curses-UI-0.95).

Known Issues:

1. While booting an assertion error is visible from svc.startd along with a Notice that / filesystem is full. This does not cause any harm or other side effects and / is being cleaned up.
2. SMF display an odd PID/contract not found message on the console.
3. Audio support is not yet tested.

Coming Soon:

1. Support for booting into a graphical desktop (Xorg, XFCE et.al.)
2. Support for booting the 64bit kernel on AMD64
3. A simple install utility that allows the user to create Solaris partitions on harddisk and copies and configures the LiveCD contents for booting OpenSolaris from harddisk.
4. Simple curses based UI to manage services on Solaris
5. Bootup configuration for Locale and Timezone
6. Full release of all the scripts/techniques/utilities (and associated technical docs) used to build and boot an OpenSolaris LiveCD.