BeleniX

This is the first release of the BeleniX LiveDVD
(992MB). It is
essentially 0.5.1 with the addition of JDK 1.6,
OpenOffice 2.1, Netbeans
5.5 with Visual Web Pack, C/C++ Pack, Profiler and
Glassfish AppServer
9, all the OpenSolaris Developer and
Administration documents available
from the OpenSolaris Documentation Community, and
Desktop shortcuts for
all these.

This release bundles the Nvidia 3D accelerated
driver. This will enable nice stuff like
compositing effects in Xfce (transparency and
shadows). It was updated to use OpenSolaris build
52. This build features the addition of HAL and
System D-BUS daemon and iSCSI support for ZFS. An
Xorg configuration utility, based on Perl-Curses,
was added. Firefox was updated to 2.0 and
Thunderbird was updated to 1.5.0.8. Koffice was
updated to 1.6.0. The bug that used to cause a
boot-up error after harddisk install was fixed.
Several other bugs like the KDE screen lock issue
were fixed.

The significant feature of this release is support for read-only mounting and accessing both Ext2FS and NTFS partitions on either primary or logical partitions. The base OS has been updated to a recent pre-build48 snapshot of OpenSolaris. The utilities from NTFSprogs provide read-write access to NTFS. A small GUI written in Tcl/Tk is available to access and mount hard disk partitions at the click of a mouse. XFce has been upgraded to 4.4 Beta2. Firefox has been updated. There are installer enhancements.

This is the first release of the ISO Remastering
Tookit for BeleniX. It allows one to create
customized LiveCDs based on BeleniX. The HOWTO
describes the process in detail.

The significant feature of this release is the development of an I/O scheduler for the HSFS module in OpenSolaris. The I/O scheduler enhances CD-ROM read performance by using I/O reordering with the CLOOK algorithm, I/O coalescing, and semi-asynchronous read-ahead that benefits sequential read. This HSFS enhancement reduces live CD boot time by up to 24 seconds and improves general CD-ROM performance by up to 25%. It was updated to a recent OpenSolaris source snapshot (20060626) that contains many fixes and improvements. Drivers and device support were updated.