Sun Microsystems's India Engineering Center has created a liveCD based on OpenSolaris and a variety of free software, including Xorg, the XFce lightweight desktop environment, bash, Firefox, Gaim, and “SuperTux,” a Super Mario Brothers clone. The Center hopes its “Belenix” CD will help popularize OpenSolaris in India's open source community.

The liveCD represents the Belenix project's first release capable of booting into a graphical environment. The project hopes to follow up eventually with support for hard drive installation.

The Belenix liveCD is very slow, due in part to debugging hooks in its SunOS 5.11 kernel. It also mounts the filesystem from the CD-ROM, rather than on a RAMdisk, resulting in slow application launch times. It takes about 10 minutes to boot on a 1.6GHz Pentium M board with 1GB of RAM, for example, while the nice-looking XFce desktop environment and Firefox each take five minutes or so to load.

Still, the Belenix CD gives a pretty good idea of what OpenSolaris could become. It shows off a variety of recent free software programs to good effect, and for the most part, programs run with acceptable alacrity once instantiated, suggesting that a harddrive-installable version could be fairly usable.

The Belenix website says the project will aim to integrate modern software, rather than aiming for ultra-stability. It hopes to integrate additional free software ports as they become available.

One source for OpenSolaris ports is BlastWave, where a couple of thousand x86 and Sparc packages can be found, with PowerPC planned. BlastWave says that close to a million OpenSolaris packages were downloaded in October, up from about half a million in September.

According to the project's website, the name Belenix comes from “Belenos,” the Sun God in Celtic mythology.

Availability

The Belenix distribution is available for free download under Sun's controversial CDDL license. Additional details, and the liveCD download can be found here. Screenshots are available here.

 
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