[ug-bosug] BeleniX 0.5.1 LiveDVD!

[USM Bish]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 09:17:24PM +0530, Moinak Ghosh wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
>   I am a bit delayed in my work on the upcoming 0.6
> release. In the meantime BeleniX 0.5.1now comes in
> a LiveDVD form.
> 
> It's about 920MB in size and contains the following
> additional stuff in addition to the CD version:
> 
> 1) OpenOffice.ORG 2.1
> 2) JDK 1.6 (DLJ License version)
> 3) Netbeans 5.5 with Java EE Application Server 9.0 U1 bundle
>   *) Visual Web Pack
>   *) Profiler
>   *) C/C++ Pack
> 4) SUN Java System Appserver (Glassfish) included with Netbeans.
> 5) All the OpenSolaris Developer and Administration docs available from:
>   http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation/
> 6) Desktop shortcuts for all of the above.
> 
> Regards,
> Moinak.
> 

Well done Moinak and the rest of the Belenix crew. It has sure
been a lot  of hard work and the progress  has been good. Over
the  last one  year, the  things have  surely changed  for the
better.

But one  thing I  am still  to appreciate.  What is  the exact
objective of belenix ?

One  thing for  sure, there  are limits  to how  much you  can
really bloat a "live" distro.  There are severe strains put on
system  resources. As  it is,  a  DVD based  live distro  puts
almost 75% of users today who have plain CD based systems (not
DVD) a  bit handicapped.  Besides a minimum  of 512  mb memory
would be the  baseline, and with more stuff coming  in, even 1
gig of memory would fall shortly.

For an usable  "live distro" these things need  a closer look.
Probably a swappable boot and applications CD where apps could
run  from the  CD (from  CD or  pen) once  the base  system is
booted and placed on ramdisk, would be the way to go.

The other way to go would  be a primary hard disk installation
- the way GNU/Solaris (Nexenta) is doing ... for a larger user
base, smaller memories  and commonly used h/w must  be kept in
mind.

Bish