Trying out belenix

Posted by Taggy

August 20, 2007

Now that we have an official Open Solaris user group in our college ,i can find execuses to find computers and free internet .Last weekend i download belenix 0.6.1 and wanted to test it out .So i created some extra gigs on my laptop and installed it out .

Surprising that even though belenix has come out as a full fledged OS,it doesnt have an easy to use GUI installer .It can be difficult especially with partitioning a mistake here can rob you of your entire data on the disk . I tried it out and luckily didn’t screw it up .

After the installation finishes through and it asks for installing grub in mbr ,i say yes and when i reboot i end up with a dreadful GRUB> :( .I so very hate this grub prompt .

And then i had to look for the old commands to find my partition to load from ,and add to that the tabfor kernel path that i usually use in fedora or ubuntu is not there :( .

So,for people who got stuck like me ,here is what you need to do

GRUB> find /boot/grub/stage1

It returns something like ( hd0,2,a) [ for me]

then do

GRUB> root (hd0,2,a)

and it should tell you that the partition is ufs

GRUB> kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot kernel/unix

It should tell you that kernel has been loaded

GRUB> module /platform/i86pc/boot_archive

GRUB>boot

and now you should see the belenix 0.6.1 booting up.

Apart form this ,belenix is wonderful.light (my laptop has 256 MB ram ) and also contains netbeans ( My fav java IDE) and yeah it obviously comes with DTrace .

And yeah for those with NVidia ,you have compiz too :).

If i have to give it a rating out of 10 i would give it atleast 8 ,and that too only because of its less user friendly installer,somehow installer is the first thing a user sees and it shouldn’t be put off .May be if belenix was a part of code for freedom i would love to write an installer for it in pygtk or gtk for that matter

I definitely suggest people try and use belenix .its not the best but no reasons why it can’t be :)

you can download from here

http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=download

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