After a long gap and lots of things happening behind the scenes, the BeleniX team is pleased to announce the availability of BeleniX 0.7, an OpenSolaris-based community distribution. This release marks a considerable change in the evolution of BeleniX. Read on for the details.
The 0.7 release of BeleniX is the first BeleniX release to be based on Sun's Project Indiana, the effort (headed by Debian-founder Ian Murdock) to create a binary OpenSolaris distribution which aims to simplify OpenSolaris' installation procedure, to bring its looks up-to-date, and to introduce a network-based package management system to OpenSolaris.
The bad news is that BeleniX 0.7 does not yet actually include the new package manager, since the Image Packaging System (as it is called) is "still in the works". The good news is that the release announcement lists enough other interesting new things (this is just a selection):
- Re-branded Caiman Installer installs BeleniX to ZFS root.
- BeleniX now includes the full 64Bit Kernel and libraries. The LiveCD is still 32Bit, but the 64Bit kernel is booted on 64Bit CPUs after installation to harddisk.
- Properly integrated and themed KDE 3.5.8. BeleniX now includes the K Display Manager SMF service which comes up by default while booting from harddisk. People familiar with the legacy DTlogin will welcome its ability to drop down to Console Login unlike GDM and the seamless desktop login (again unlike GDM!).
- Additional software can be downloaded via the
/usr/bin/get-pkgs utility. Please see the Release Notes for more details. This is a temporary measure till BeleniX migrates to Image Packaging with its own repository.
- The bundled in Gtk-Qt theme engine provides Qt theming support for GTk apps running under KDE.
- The Firefox form widgets look better thanks to KDEwidgets from Kde-Look.org.
You can check out screenshots, read the Getting Started page, and then proceed to the download page.
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