BeaFanatIX Review

Some of you have probably heard a few years ago about a project called BeatrIX - a small GNU/Linux LiveCD distribution, which was pretty popular at that time. Unfortunately, the BeatrIX project has been discontinued since 2005.

The BeaFanatIX project started as a remaster of BeatrIX. The team extracted BeatrIX, changed some stuff, and put everything back on the CD. It was still BeatrIX, but with a face lift. You can find a lot of descriptions about BeaFanatIX (BFX for short) on the Internet, like "BeatrIX reloaded" or "Debian built on Knoppix", but what is BFX really? You might be surprised, but BeaFanatIX is a customized LiveCD based on Ubuntu 5.10 (codename Breezy Badger). However, because the Ubuntu LiveCD is loading rather slow, the BeaFanatIX development team used the techniques from the Knoppix Linux LiveCD distribution in order to get a fast bootable CD.

First BootI've downloaded the ISO (approx. 157 MB in size), burned it on a blank CD and put it in my CD-ROM, in order to boot from it. After a few seconds, I was prompted with a customized GRUB splash, the BeaFanatIX logo/mascot – the black cat. First option is "Boot from first harddisk", which is not a common thing as some users many not look at the bootloader screen and just press enter. So, in order to start the LiveCD environment, you need to press the second option - "BeaFanatIX 2006.2 *default* (1024x768x16, english) - (why it is marked as *default* I really don't know, hopefully they will fix this bug in a future version). Please wait a few seconds for the LiveCD to load. You will see a lot of text on the screen as the CD tries to discover your hardware and load all the necessary services and modules. I have an Optiplex 740 machine from DELL, and I was amazed when BeaFanatIX recognized the AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ that comes with my PC.

Under the hood

The main components that power this version of BeaFanatIX 2006.2 are:

• Linux kernel 2.6.15 with patch ck7 (compiled with gcc-4.0.1

• libc6-2.3.5

• GCC 4.0.1 compiler

• Xorg 6.8.2

• Gnome 2.12.2 desktop environment

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