BeleniX Project Ideas

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Completion color code:

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Project Name
 Status Description/Comments
Busybox like Compact Shell 15% Done, Sample compact bourne shell in BeleniX 0.6

Implement a tool similar to Busybox. It will be one executable having minimal versions of various utilities statically built into one compact executable. The functionality of an utility will be invoked based on how the binary is invoked via a symlink. The list of utilities built into this tool should be configurable.

This is now an OpenSolaris Project: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/busybox/
ISO Remastering Tool 45% Done

ISO Remastering Tool for BeleniX. This should be one or more scripts that given a BeleniX ISO should be able to uncompress the image and rebuild the ISO. The user should be able to customise, what goes into the ISO.

A sample tool is available but it has some problems and is currently outdated. Needs more work and a GUI.
Control Panel GUIs 0% Done GUI Utilities to perform common configuration tasks like Network Configuration, Managing Local Users, Managing SMF etc. These should be individual standalone tools with uniform look and feel and should not depend on the functionality offerred by any particular desktop.
Enhancements to the installer 35% Done
  1. Provide an option to install Grub either on MBR or inside the Solaris Partition - Done.
  2. Better UI to create partitions - Done based on GParted
  3. Allow creation of ZFS filesystem - Partially Done.
  4. Configure CUPS after installation - TODO
  5. Verify whether Xorg configuration is present. Xorg configuraion may not be present if BeleniX LiveCD was booted directly into Command Line mode - TODO
  6. Option to preserve existing slices - TODO
  7. Automatically add Grub entries for other bootable partitions - TODO
  8. Ability to resize partitions - Via GParted, needs testing.
  9. UI to configure Network and Timezone - TODO
  10. UI to add additional users - Done
  11. Package selection UI for SVR4 packaging - TODO
Hardware Data Collector 50% Done Tool to collect hardware profile from the user's machine and upload it to a server. This will allow to keep track of which boxes and hardware work with BeleniX. Some scripting has been done. One question remains: How do we validate authentic data uploads from the tool as opposed to SPAM ?
UnionFS 0% Done Implement UnionFS for OpenSolaris. The FreeBSD UnionFS along with some external patches can be ported.
USB Boot 100%Done Make BeleniX bootable from USB Stick. This will allow an user to carry the computing environment anywhere and also store data on the Stick. This is essentially Ubiquitious Computing.
Port GNU Parted 80% Done Basic port of GNU Parted to OpenSolaris is available on BeleniX 0.6 onwards with GParted GUI. However a few things remain to be done like recognizing UFS filesystem label.
Zone Support 5% Done Improve support for creating Zones on BeleniX. Now with SVR4 packaging available for OpenSolaris base this should be much easier to implement.
GUI Login Manager 0% Done Add a login manager like Xdm, Gdm or Kdm. Pre-configured KDM will be available from 0.6.1 onwards.
Replace closed source commands 0% Done

Some userland tools are still closed source. These should be re-implemented as open source. Some are very simple and some a bit more difficult. Many will go away after KSH93 become the default KSH in 0.6.1 since those commands are implemented as calls to KSH builtins. Complete list:

  1. usr/bin/test
  2. usr/bin/printf
  3. usr/bin/iconv
  4. usr/bin/wait
  5. usr/bin/elfsign
  6. usr/bin/bg
  7. usr/bin/type
  8. usr/bin/cd
  9. usr/bin/getopts
  10. usr/bin/tr
  11. usr/bin/alias
  12. usr/bin/pax
  13. usr/bin/umask
  14. usr/bin/fg
  15. usr/bin/od
  16. usr/bin/read
  17. usr/bin/ulimit
  18. usr/bin/jobs
  19. usr/bin/hash
  20. usr/bin/sed
  21. usr/bin/fc
  22. usr/bin/unalias
  23. usr/bin/tail
  24. usr/bin/kill
  25. usr/bin/patch
RAM Based Boot 0% Done Provide boottime option to load cdrom contents into ramdisk or a harddisk partition. This will speed up subsequent bootup. The Ramdisk module currently depends on contiguous chunk of physical memory available to do this. This may not be available early on in Boot. It needs to be investigated whether the Ramdisk module can be extended to use an array of non-contiguous storage chunks.
Xorg Config UI 100% Done Interactive boot option to provide an interactive UI to the user to allow him to review and modify the Xorg configuration.
AMD64 Support in BeleniX 0% Done Provide support for AMD64 in BeleniX. This involves modifying the LiveCD build to also build another miniroot that support the AMD64 kernel.
GUI Installer 0% Done BeleniX needs a GUI based installer. Enhance the existing installer and use Perl/GTK to provide the GUI.
I/O Scheduler 100% Done ZFS supports dynamic I/O re-ordering to make disk accesses more sequential. This can be ported to the HSFS filesystem to re-order reads and help in generally speeding up CDROM access on OpenSolaris. Done via the HSFS I/O Scheduling and readahead enhancements.
Support Linux SWAP 90% Done Enhancements to allow using Linux Swap on OpenSolaris. This is done via lofi extensions to export a portion of an existing device as a separate pseudo device and create the appropriate /dev/dsk/... links. Linux SWAP keeps a header at the beginning of the partition and the remaining area is just empty without any formatting info. So it is possible to tell OpenSolaris to use a the Linux SWAP partition and use the SWAP area leaving aside an initial 10MB block so that the header is not disturbed. - Done. Under Testing
Ext2/3 and NTFS read support 100% Done Add support for ntfs read and ext3 read. This need not necessarily be kernel based filesystem modules. Userland code to access the raw partitions and read and handle filesystem data is also good.
Better Projector Support 0% Done Better support for auto-configuring Xorg. Currently BeleniX does not add configuration options to support projectors. This can be done using a small video card database.
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