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

[tags]opensolaris,belenix[/tags]

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