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. But BeleniX is not a SUN project. It grew out of a personal passion of a couple of guys who happened to work for SUN. BeleniX is now a community project with contributors both inside and outside of SUN. There were a variety of other considerations:

1. An easily available OpenSolaris distribution is needed to popularize OpenSolaris among the BIG Indian Open Source community.
2. 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.
3. Official Solaris is now an Open OS. In fact it is a complete OpenSolaris distribution that is highly tested and very stable. Many people will want to use this. However there are many folks in the OSS community: students, hackers, power users and professors who are quite 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.
4. 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.
5. 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 truly Open Source operating system.

The BeleniX philosophy can be easily gathered from a mail sent to the opensolaris mailing list:

I started this work for personal reasons initially - learning opportunity, opportunity to do something that has a high impact, scratch an itch, excitement and sense of achievement to be able to hack up a bootable UNIX from a CD where there are no tools for the job. Any college student can do it for Linux in a day as there are well developed mature tools, but for OpenSolaris it is a different story. I was also getting more and more ideas to make OpenSolaris more usable and approachable to people and this is an excellent testbed to try out such stuff. I find it easiest to try these when I am not having to justify my every move to someone else. Make mistakes and learn from them. But as I progressed, I realized another point - culturally this had the potential to generate interest and even excitement locally in Bangalore/India and get people to look at OpenSolaris and even start coding. The potential being amplified by the fact that this work is being done on their home turf. Bring down barriers to participation. And over time we have observed this to actually happen in practice and is continuing. BeleniX is continuing to enthuse and attract people and is becoming an expression of identity for some of us. Also we have been conscious of being open and sharing. That is why we have detailed technical docs and source code to all the innovations easily accessible right from the beginning. We do not want BeleniX to be a black box. Others have already picked up some of the stuff and uilized them. Yes maintaining a distro is a *lot* of work, but now it is a passion, an identity, a part of life, a way to innovate, and in fact a growing community - something that brings people together.

Goals and Objectives

A short note on goals and objectives is not out of place here. BeleniX is 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 guarantees 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.

Team

• Moinak Ghosh (moinakg (at) gmail (_dot) com) - Lead developer and initiator.
• Shivakumar G.N.
• Ananth Shrinivas
• Sriram Narayanan
• Anil Gulecha
• Manish Chakravarty

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.