BeleniX

Belenix Project Ideas

July 13 2006

• Implement a tool similar to Busybox. It will be one executable having minimal versions of various utilities statically built into one compact executable. The functionality of an utility will be invoked based on how the binary is invoked via a symlink. The list of utilities built into this tool should be configurable. This is required to further reduce the size of the ramdisk.


• ISO Remastering Tool for BeleniX. This should be one or more scripts that given a BeleniX ISO should be able to uncompress the image and rebuild the ISO. The user should be able to customise, what goes into the ISO.


• GUI Utilities to perform common configuration tasks like Network Configuration, Managing Local Users, Managing SMF etc. These should be individual standalone tools with uniform look and feel and should not depend on the functionality offerred by any particular desktop.


• Enhancements to the installer
  1. Provide an option to install Grub either on MBR or inside the Solaris Partition
  2. Better UI to create partitions
  3. Allow creation of ZFS filesystem
  4. Configure CUPS after installation
  5. Verify whether Xorg configuration is present. Xorg configuraion may not be present if BeleniX LiveCD was booted directly into Command Line mode.
  6. Option to preserve existing slices
  7. Automatically add Grub entries for other bootable partitions
  8. Ability to resize partitions
  9. UI to configure Network and Timezone
  10. UI to add additional users
  11. Package selection UI once packaging has been finalized


• Need to implement Pkgsrc packaging for BeleniX. In addition we need some tools to be compatible with SVR4 packaging as well - A tool like dpkg's alien that can import an SVR4 package into Pkgsrec format. One question is how to handle the dependency information ?


• Tool to collect hardware profile from the user's machine and upload it to a server. This will allow to keep track of which boxes and hardware work with BeleniX.


• Implement UnionFS like functionality. This can be an extension to lofs - the Loopback Filesystem.


• Make BeleniX bootable from USB Stick. This will allow an user to carry the computing environment anywhere and also store data on the Stick. This is essentially Ubiquitious Computing. - In Progress


• Till Solaris Manpages are released we need a small tool to automatically fetch HTML manpages from docs.sun.com and cache them locally if BeleniX is installed to harddisk.


• Improve support for creating Zones on BeleniX.


• Add a login manager like Xdm or Gdm.


• Some userland tools are still closed source. These should be re-implemented as open source. Some are very simple and some a bit more difficult. Complete list:
  1. usr/bin/test
  2. usr/bin/printf
  3. usr/bin/iconv
  4. usr/bin/wait
  5. usr/bin/elfsign
  6. usr/bin/bg
  7. usr/bin/type
  8. usr/bin/cd
  9. usr/bin/getopts
  10. usr/bin/tr
  11. usr/bin/alias
  12. usr/bin/pax
  13. usr/bin/umask
  14. usr/bin/fg
  15. usr/bin/od
  16. usr/bin/read
  17. usr/bin/ulimit
  18. usr/bin/jobs
  19. usr/bin/hash
  20. usr/bin/sed
  21. usr/bin/fc
  22. usr/bin/unalias
  23. usr/bin/tail
  24. usr/bin/kill
  25. usr/bin/patch


• Many of these commands like cd, kill etc are links to usr/bin/alias which in turn in a script that invokes ksh to execute the corresponding builtin command. Re-implementing these commands will help to remove this dependency and performance overhead.


• Provide boottime option to load cdrom contents into ramdisk or a harddisk partition. This will speed up subsequent bootup. - Need to modify the lofi compression code


• Interactive boot option to provide an interactive UI to the user to allow him to review and modify the Xorg configuration.


• General MBR/Partition editing tools (like GNU Parted) and recovery tools.


• Provide support for AMD64 in BeleniX. This involves modifying the LiveCD build to also build another miniroot that support the AMD64 kernel. In addition a few of the modules like aperture needs to be modified to be able to work in 64bit mode. - 64Bit aperture already available


• BeleniX needs a GUI based installer. One possibility is to port Anaconda to BeleniX. Alternatively we can just enhance the existing installer and use Perl/GTK to provide the GUI.


• ZFS supports dynamic I/O re-ordering to make disk accesses more sequential. This can be ported to the HSFS filesystem to re-order reads and help in generally speeding up CDROM access on OpenSolaris. - Done as of 0.4.4


• Enhancements to allow using Linux Swap on OpenSolaris. This is not too difficult to implement. No changes to any Kernel modules are required. The idea is to walk through the partition table to identify where on the harddisk the Linux SWAP partition (if any) begins. Linux SWAP keeps a header at the beginning of the partition and the remaining area is just empty without any formatting info. So it is possible to tell OpenSolaris to use a the Linux SWAP partition and use the SWAP area leaving aside an initial 10MB block so that the header is not disturbed. - Done. Under Testing


• Add support for ntfs read and ext3 read. This need not necessarily be kernel based filesystem modules. Userland code to access the raw partitions and read and handle filesystem data is also good. - NTFS Read Support available


• Better support for auto-configuring Xorg. Currently BeleniX does not add configuration options to support projectors. This can be done using a small video card database.