BeleniX 0.6.1 has been released. This is primarily a bugfix release fixing some of the bigger bugs in 0.6 though there remains some more to fix in 0.6.2. “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.”
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=hdinstall
If I were to choose a small OpenSolaris distro BeleniX would be it. BeleniX is far less buggy than Nexenta and far less bloated than Solaris Express.
So BeleniX lives in a happy medium.
The irony of all this is BeleniX is (I think) all done by one man.
it’s great to see a quality OpenSolaris distribution with KDE on it … i first tried BeleniX last year after it was given to me by a couple of the BeleniX devs at a conference and was quite impressed with it.
there are still some things in KDE that didn’t work as well on OpenSolaris as they do on Linux/BSD, but with the OpenSolaris/KDE project really taking off these days i have good hope that these issues will get ironed out and BeleniX will get even better as a result =)
and no, BeleniX is not all done by one person anymore.. there’s a nice, if smallish, team of people working on it (half a dozen or so). i believe they are credited on the BeleniX website.
there’s a nice, if smallish, team of people working on it (half a dozen or so). i believe they are credited on the BeleniX website.
That’s probably what BeleniX keeps lean on the Bloat and bugs. Too many cooks spoil the broth.
(Not bashing the open-source way or anything, but there needs to be a very strict organizational structure if there are a lot of developers. Debian got this right, but they’re a bit too stringent with their testing and stability guidelines. Community coding is fine (of course!), as long as there’s an offficial project leader and team of maintainers for each individual part to thoroughly inspect and test community-submitted code and such.)
I was *extremely* impressed with BeleniX when I tried it, or maybe I was extremely unimpressed with Nexenta and didn’t realize it until I tried something better.
Edited 2007-07-14 19:17
Edit: This was a dupe comment. Do your deleting thing, moderators.
Edited 2007-07-14 19:17
Last time I tried installing Belenix on the hard disk, it stuffed up all my boot sectors on all partitions even though I told it not touch them. All I did is deleted the Linux ext3 and replaced it with the Solaris partition….and…looks like it went beyond what it was suppose to do.
Anyway, the actual Belenix itself is a top notch. I like the way their mounting/unmounting works, I like the way KDE looks on it and I like the Compiz window manager. Well done on that but the hard disk install has a serious bug.
Edited 2007-07-13 21:28
This is one OS to keep an eye on.
Belenix could be a nice basis for the Indiana project a new binary distribution of OpenSolaris.
http://blogs.sun.com/anilg/
its a geat livecd but needs a LOT more testing. especially the hd installer.
had they tested it, they would’ve known to change the multiboot line in grub (solaris kernels are loaded directly now, not via multiboot) so the thing could actually get past grub.
anyway, as a livecd, detected my nvidia card, set up all the visual effects etc automatically. pity the hdinstaller is so terrible.
Have you reported this issue to them? I assume you’re speaking of the hdinstaller specifically and not the livecd grub?
Edited 2007-07-14 17:07 UTC
I am curious about the number of “OSes” out there all of which seem to be reiterations of the things already being done by others.
Who knows how many Linux distributions, few of them with anything even remotely original in them, and certainly nothing original in their Desktops.
How many OSes running KDE do we really need, how many with Gnome?
I realize that the Open Source movement is in love with its sense of freedom, but might it not also be kind of shooting itself in the foot with all the bloody replication?
I am not trying to troll here, I really am curious how all of this is really innovating at any level?
ignoring the obvious analog of biological diversity and the mechanisms of evolution that drive it, one might instead point to open economies where more than one company is allowed to compete in the same market.
either way, it’s fairly evident that competition, while often locally inefficient, is a remarkably (globally) efficient process of creating better things that otherwise would not be arrived at.
it’s not being “in love with our sense of freedom”, it’s taking advantage of the benefits that come with that freedom such as the ability to experiment freely, engage in fulfilling endeavors and even tempt failure as a means to experimentally find good solutions.
as for what innovation comes of it all … we could start with something like package management and go from there. there are hundreds of individual innovations we could list if we bothered to sit down and do so that came from this distro or that. we have the luxury of letting competing concepts prove themselves and this tends towards more optimal solutions for the needs of those who use the technology.
of course, sometimes we arrive at multiple “winners” where each carves out enough of the ecosystem to survive.
occasionally that situation of multiple successes causes problems and/or practical annoyances, but imho those situations are a minority and well compensated for by the rest of the good that comes out of this system of working.
there’s also something to be said about not having all of one’s eggs in one basket. it makes for a very robust ecosystem which can not be brought down easily either by outside forces or incompetence from within.
Great response! Is it copyrighted or can I cut and paste it whereever I read the seem tired comment.
> Is it copyrighted or can I cut and paste
feel free to quote me as appropriate, including using the whole thing if you wish.
Sorry if my question seemed tired, but I am glad that not everyone was as glib about it as you are and took the time to give some fairly decent answers.
I may not necessarily agree, as I do think that a lot of the replication is splintering the open source world, but as has been pointed out, there is a freedom to pick and choose and do specific things with a distribution, and in a way that is innovation even if only in recombination.
Thanks for the good replies.
On some levels there seems like there is (or there just is) a bunch of replication. A zillion distros use Gnome or KDE for instance, and most of those aren’t innovating in the desktop space at all.
But on other levels, there is innovation or at least uniqueness. Innovative or unique design processes or software configurations, for instance. The PCLinuxOS team operates differently than the Mandriva team, and each thinks they can offer something valuable. Belenix is unique among OpenSolaris distros because it is a 100% open source OpenSolaris LiveCD with KDE.
So my conclusion is that part of the duplicated features or systems you see is genuinely duplicated, while other things are unique. Every distro probably has SOMETHING special going on.
At first glance I think it is unfortunate that more of these guys don’t team up and work together to produce greater things. But the truth is that the diversity and independence found in the free open source software world is probably because of normal human nature, not because of anything specific to FOSS.
And even more to the point, you can’t just throw more people at a project and have it develop faster. There is a limited amount of development parallelization found in software development. So even if all these distros DID want to work together, there’s no reason to believe that they would achieve increased productivity anywhere close to linearly related to the number of people involved.
You may think so..but the fact is that what we need
is one bug free os..but none of them are…for example
all linux distros suffer from the horrible ALSA..
I have also seen stability issues with java..
so if Belinix has the same software but is stable, efficient and robust, they will have done something not
done before..
…to have a solaris branche in Debian (for instance), instead of having several separate OpenSolaris distributions? Let’s face it, the innovations in OpenSolaris are not a slicker version of Gnome or a revolutionary package manager or some other userland-esque stuff like that.
The true innovation is on the backend (with surrounding features like ZFS). So why not focus on that and try to create a set of packages in Debian that would convert your ‘GNU/Linux Debian’ install to a ‘GNU/OpenSolaris Debian’ install? For example in Debian there are packages named kernel-image-2.6-${arch}. Wouldn’t it be nice if there also were opensolaris-kernel-image-${version}-${arch} packages together with peripheral packages for ZFS and others?
Btw I am just brainstorming. Maybe it’s not even close to feasible.
Edited 2007-07-14 17:56
Good question, would be nice to just swap the kernel but I think it is very hard to achieve.
Most of the user space programs have to deal with glibc and, as it interact with the kernel level, it would have to be changed too. Besides, if you care to look how things are assembled, you will note that there are a lot of #define XX_YYY #, parameters values, functions calls and so on that are adjusted to a particular kernel and so we have a cascade effect many levels deep. It is so hard that can not be easily achieved even between a older linux kernel (versions 2.4.xx and 2.6.xx) and a new one (actually, it is not even easy on the 2.6.xx series).
Anyway, would really be very nice.
From the roadmap on the BeleniX website…
Debian GNU/Solaris would be an interestnig project, they already have a Debian NetBSD project. That would be a good idea too.