B'lore techies put OpenSolaris on CD

Bangalore’s techies are creating some cutting edge stuff. Moinak Ghosh, an engineer at Sun Microsystems, has taken the lead on Solaris 10, the flagship operating system (OS) of Sun, and come up with a new version called BeleniX.

Moinak has taken the whole OS and created an abridged LiveCD version. The significance here is that this OS does not require installation as it can run from the CD itself.

BeleniX was developed by Moinak during his spare time, along with developers from the open source community . The team included Venkata Kishore, Sriram Popuri, Pradhap Devarajan and Gangadhar Mylapuram.

The basic version was launched way back in October 2005 without a graphic user interface (GUI). But this latest format of the OS has generated huge interest. BeleniX (in Celtic, that’s the Sun God of Belinas) has had nearly 16 releases till date and close to 5,000 CDs have been given out so far. It has also witnessed some 33,000 downloads. Moinak is excited about the manner in which BeleniX is getting enhancements from developers worldwide, given its open source platform.

"The complete OS boots and runs from a CD-ROM without touching the hard disk. A desktop environment is made available to the user in 1 minute and 40 seconds. The main aim of this initiative is to generate greater interest in the Indian open source community for OpenSolaris."

OpenSolaris is the open source version of the Solaris operating system, which allows developers across the world to work and improve the OS. It is easily downloadable.

A CD can take up to 700 MB data. When this acted as an obstacle to create a LiveCD version, Moinak and his team came up with a compression technology to accomodate 1.8 GB of software.

Bangalore has the second largest active OpenSolaris user group worldwide. While the interest in enhancements to BeleniX is huge, a student in one of Bangalore’s major colleges is working on putting the whole version on flash memory. If this happens, it may not be long before we carry our entire hard disk in our pocket.