BeleniX on a USB

BeleniX can now boot from a USB drive. We had a first hand demo and a talk on how it was done by Anil Gulecha, an engineering student in Bangalore in the Bangalore OpenSolaris User Group (BOSUG) meeting last night.

For those of you not following BeleniX, there are a bunch of new features that went in recently. It can now mount NTFS, ext2, ext3, FAT, UFS and ZFS (all read/write) partitions on your hard disk – including extended partitions. There is even a nifty GUI that Moinak has written in Tcl/Tk for displaying and mounting/umounting filesystems. The BeleniX remastering toolkit has also been released. This is a set of scripts that allow you to build your own custom LiveCD based on BeleniX. It features the latest and greatest versions of Firefox – 1.5.0.7, Thunderbird – 1.5.0.7 and XFCE – 4.4 Beta 2. Add to it the HSFS improvements, boot time optimizations, disk layout optimizations, Lofi Compression (The BeleniX CD contains 2 GB of data in a compressed format !!) – BeleniX is now certainly one of the best LiveCDs. Oops ! Did I say LiveCD ? You can install it on your Hard Disk and Boot off a USB drive too. So BeleniX is a proper “Operating System” or a distro if you prefer that ! If you are curious, download version 0.5 with all these features bundled.

Now that I’ve shamelessly pulled off my marketing plug, the other talk last night was by me on Branded Zones. A Solaris Zones technology that allows you install a linux distro and run a linux environment inside Solaris ! For those of you complaining about fancy applications not being available on Solaris, enjoy ! I also had the privilege of organizing yesterdays session as our BOSUG leader and scripting god Venky T.V. was not around. Fun times !

P.S: In case you are interested, here is my Branded Zones Presentation.

Filed under: Open Source, Operating Systems, Solaris