[ug-bosug] Belenix 0.3

[USM Bish]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 09:09:32PM +0530, Moinak Ghosh wrote:
> 
[ some snipped ]
> 
> > What  are the  essential additions/  differences from  the 
> > Nov release ?
> 
> The primary  feature is a Hard  Disk installer (hdinstaller)
> utility. This  is not yet a  GUI. It is a  Perl-Curses based
> utility that  can also be  navigated using the mouse  if you
> are running the Xfce desktop.

This is nice. At this point  of development of a dot something
release  candidate,  no  point  going  any  further  than  any
scripted install ... you guys  obviously would have your minds
on the core sections. These 'gui niceties' can wait.

>
> Apart from that there  are numerous customisations to reduce
> bootup time. The most significant reductions happen when you
> have 512MB RAM or a little more.
>

Yeah, this is an important issue.  The problem is not of 'more
the merrier',  but of  'how little will  do'. The  version 0.2
needed a min of  256 mb, can the new one be  pushed to work in
older boxes (with say 128 mb of RAM) ?

> I  have  also  disabled  the insecure  services  like  ftpd,
> telnetd etc. and most of the RPC services.

This seems a sensible move. I really do not know, but how many
people really permit access through telnetd ? It has been sshd
for  me for  years. Is  telnetd that  essential ?  For a  live
distro, I  don't think  telnetd, or for  that matter  even ftp
daemon is of much use. Just  my POV ... However RPC, I thought
was one of specialised things,  also used by Solaris for handy
network  programming  and  sharing of  resources.  Would  this
functionality be affected once Belenix  is installed on a hard
disk in a  networked environment ? And would the  RFC 1057 and
1831 compliance be retained ?

> 
> BTW my current effort is  directed at enhancing the loopback
> block device  module called  lofi that  makes a  file behave
> like a  block device. So that  for example you can  create a
> filesystem in a file.
>

This sure is a handy thing ... mounting files as a loop device
would surely be a required step ...

> I am adding on-the-fly decompression support to lofi so that
> it  can  provide  random  access to  a  specially  formatted
> compressed file. This will allow me to compress the contents
> of the CD to reduce access time and pack in more than 1.5 GB
> of stuff in a 700MB CD.  I have already tested the prototype
> approach in  userland and  now implementing  it in  the lofi
> kernel module.

... and specially so for  reasons stated above. The Compressed
Loop  (cloop) kind  of system  is needed.  This would  be very
important once you want to hyper-pack Belenix with apps.

At the rate you guys are progessing, it seems there would be a
zero dot  version almost every  four weeks, till some  sort of
v-1 comes out. Nice to see the rapid progess ...

Best wishes,

Bish

_______________________________________________
ug-bosug mailing list
List-Unsubscribe: mailto:ug-bosug-unsubscribe at opensolaris.org
List-Owner: mailto:ug-bosug-owner at opensolaris.org
List-Archives: http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ug-bosug