Libranet 2.8 Review

TheMadPenguin writes "When I heard about Libranet 2.8 containing KDE 3.1 and kernel 2.4.20 in our forums, I just about fell out of the chair I was sitting in. As you all probably already know, Libranet is a Debian-based distro aimed toward the desktop user. Until now, I had never heard of a Debian release with all the newest goodies, but my world was about to get turned upside down. Read the full review with screenshots at MadPenguin.org."

What good is this distro?

[jkrise]

From the referenced review:

I tried installing on an Intel Celeron 533MHz/128MB system... I was initially curious to see how well this release would run on a lower end system.(128MB - lower end for installing a distro?)

In plain English: It didn't.

If a distro needs anything faster than a 533 Celeron and/or more than 128MB RAM, it's got to be ranked as useless. From a Linux standpoint, though.

"The installation routine started fine .. but after ...using ReiserFS and a swap file, it hung. I tried this several times using different varieties of partition layouts and file systems, but it was a no go. The installer kept hang at the point where it verifies that the system is bootable."

In Plain English : A useless distro.

debian and gnome

[Miguel de Icaza]

the default way gnome is configured in most debian-baded distros is appalling and unusable. The deb package maintainers seem to have no appreciation of the way the gnome registry should be used. At least here the font AA looks as good as KDE - but unless debian addresses gnome users are going do be driven to the less than free KDE desktop which is a shame frankly IMO.

good work libranet team

love

miguel

Re:Just wondering....

[mattrix2k]

No, there is NO obligation under the GPL for a distro maker to host ISOs at their expensive for the benefit of freeloaders like yourself. "Free software rulez yeah! Gimme the source! What, I have to pay for it? I'll stick to my pirate copy of Wind0ze thanks."

Re:What good is this distro?

[jkrise]

The author of the referenced article himself claims that a Celeron 533 with 128MB RAM is a low-end system. Secondly, he doesn't appear to have the necessary skills to trouble-shoot the problem, yet his review is referenced here! (seems to me, something wrong with the mobo - probably would've failed an XP instln as well, who knows?)

My point is, do Slashdot folks need slick GUIs and features, or, a working distro that does good h/w detection and is more robust? I'd place my money on the latter criterion, however slick the 'Experience'. Hence my sharp comment.

Re:What good is this distro?

[jkrise]

"claiming that Libranet draws too much resources is simply ridiculous."

If you read the ref. article, you'll see that he calls it a low-end system. He's sort of implying the distro failed to install due to lack of resources. IMO, the review is neither professional, nor thorough.

"Be careful with your quoting as well."

Point taken... I'm still figuring out with Momzilla on RH7.3 - some problems if I post HTML formatting - it seems to ignore para breaks. Sorry.

Re:JPEGs for font rendering examples?

[FyRE666]

Not only that, but the Anti-aliasing examples look a bit suspicious to me.

I recently installed KDE 3.1 onto my Gentoo machine (it's usually a headless box, but I was curious to see the improvements in KDE). The sans-serif fonts were all very nice, but bring up Slashdot with the "Times" font and it looked horrific! I'm not saying that /. is the last word in beautiful Web design, but the anti-aliasing actually made it look worse. I might try throwing some Windows fonts onto the box to see if it's better at some point...

Knoppix?

[Cthefuture]

Uh, Knoppix [knoppix.org] has had that latest stuff (KDE 3.1, new kernel, etc.) for some time now.

In case you didn't know, Knoppix is Debian based and has some awesome hardware auto-detection utilities.

This would be a first...

[Qbertino]

...if that Font AA stuff he's telling about is true. I have never seen consitant/existing font-AA across the desktop (Motif/QT/GTK/whatever/etc.) on Linux.
If they managed to untangle the font config and renderlib mess that would be a good thing indeed.

Re:JPEGs for font rendering examples?

[antiMStroll]

Looks fine on this Gentoo box. In fact, I recently compared a new XP Pro notebook from work, an Nvidia Go P4, side-by-side with this AA'd P2 w/ ATI 4 meg video card and the screen rendering on the Gentoo box looked leagues better to my eye. (Am I correct that XP doesn't anti-alias, relying instead on the quality of their fonts?) This was comparing IE to Phoenix. Compared to 'links' compiled with svga support, the gap was greater still.

No troll intended, in my experience an anti-aliased xfree desktop now renders fonts as far ahead of XP as Windows once was ahead of xfree.

Re:What I would like to know.

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Fair enough... This is actually a fairly complete answer. I just use the software that does the job I want to do but I appreciate your viewpoint. I don't agree with RMS's view of the world and of software (and I don't think it is a subject that can be discussed in /. without flames and trolling), but I guess if it works for you it is ok with me... I haven't had much experience with using just Free software other than Redhat 8.0 which, as I understand, comes out of the box with only GPL software and, frankly, is unusable as a home PC (no mp3, no video player of any use etc. etc.) I find Mandrake with the Texstar and PLF sources to be the best Linux desktop myself.