Belenix freebie

Continuing the discussion on Belenix (see part 1)

“I cant burn the CD from the iso?”

And you used cdrw in Solaris? You probably tried:

bash$ cdrw -i belenix0.6.1.iso

Looking for CD devices...

Initializing device...done.

Size required (728453120 bytes) is greater than available space (681986048 bytes).

instead, try:

bash$ cdrw -C -i belenix0.6.1.iso

Looking for CD devices...

Initializing device...done.

Writing track 1...done.

done.

Finalizing (Can take several minutes)...done.

“What makes Belenix so special?”

The biggest is that it supports UFS (of course, it is opensolaris afterall), ZFS, Fat16, Fat32, NTFS (really!) and EXT2 / EXT3. Wow. One key with Belenix and I can rescue a file from any x86 computer in this building (windows, solaris, linux) With ZFS that also means *bsd with zfs, mac os x with zfs, Linux FUSE ZFS... I dont know of any other solution out there currently that out of the box is capable of the same (well, maybe Indiana, but it is not out).

The other, as illustrated by my picture of the laptop with no hard disk, no cdrom and minimal memory, is that Belenix doesn't abuse of your resources. It will run with 256MB of ram. Of course, a live distro with 256MB with Xorg and XFCE doesn't leave much space. You can open a few terminals, text editor, run top (see ) and the like, but open Firefox and you need to be ultra patient. 320MB would make a big difference, while 512MB would be just right (and with the laptop back to its full 2GB configuration, wow). Or course, in text mode only, 256MB is overkill.

Also, combine my previous blog entry with memtest (replace /boot/... with /media/usbkeyname/boot/...), and you now have Belenix/memtest on USB.

“I want one!”

You can go and buy a 1GB key, download Belenix, burn it on CDROM and install it with usbdump. Or you can leave a comment on my blog and let me know how you have used Belenix on USB or plan on using it, and the best story in two weeks from now gets a free USB key preloaded with Belenix (november 9). I even pay shipping. Not a contest, just me giving personal stuff away for free to the person I choose, like MaryMaryQuiteContrary would say...

How cool is that? Start typing!

Further reading (links)

http://solarisdesktop.blogspot.com/2007/10/where-is-cdrom-belenix-story.html

http://solarisdesktop.blogspot.com/2007/10/fun-with-grub-memtest.html

http://blogs.sun.com/moinakg/

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

http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=node/51

http://blogs.sun.com/anilg/entry/session_persistance_on_belenix_liveusb

http://blogs.sun.com/josephgeorge/category/BeleniX