The Scribe

Belenix is an open source operating system based on OpenSolaris. I have been lurking around the Belenix mailing list for a couple of months and it is heartening to see some serious development taking place. The primary attraction was that its a FOSS project from India with a steady development. Secondly, I am curious about OpenSolaris and wanted to see it in action.

Belenix 7.1 was released on July 19. I downloaded an iso only to see it ruined with some checksum errors. Blame it on the acute power shortage leading to constant disruption. Torrent was too slow. Then I chanced upon Vee Dee Eyes. The weird name is the sweetening of vdi, the virtual machine format used by Virtual Box. I was intending to run Belenix from a VM, so I proceeded to download it. Download finished yesterday and I sneaked in a couple of minutes with the system. Really nice to see a fully functional OS and I really liked the KDE implementation. I haven't used KDE for a long time, except for test driving KDE 4.0 from my Ubuntu, which was fairly disappointing. Belenix also includes the latest version of Firefox.

As I mentioned, I only gave it for a very small spin, but the first impression was pretty good. Will give it a grinding and post my experiences. However, a question keeps haunting me. Will this gain traction in an already overcrowded space of open source operating systems? What is the utility of having such a system? I hope to find some answers as we move along!