Libranet On The Rocks

An anonymous reader writes "Following the death of his father Jon, it looks as though Tal is going to finally throw in the towel with regards the running of Libranet. Given his age and his personal circumstances who can blame in? But on a purely selfish level, is there anyone out there who can help save my favourite distribution?"

Re:I'm sorry, but who?

[Miffe]

Ofcourse it had, it is based on Debian.

ubuntu takes over?

[Janek Kozicki]

both libranet and ubuntu are based on debian. They both use debian's package system. Libranet is dead, long live ubuntu.

Re:pickup the slack

[slavemowgli]

You just *might* have found out if you had clicked on the article link. They're there for a reason, y'know?

Re:I'm sorry, but who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious, but what is noteworthy about Libranet? Is it an especially well balenced linux distro?

As others have said here Libranet was a polished Debian with a very nice system administration utility. I came in right about Libranet 2.7, and purchased 2.7, 2.8, 2.8.1 and finally 3.0. 2.7 through 2.8.1 were ROCK SOLID.. but with 3.0 some bugs were creeping in, repositories acting wonky, etc. Libranet always had (has?) a tight community and Libranet Inc. was very responsive. When Jon passed away I had a feeling that Tal would be overwhelmed. It appears as though I was right.

I really lament the passing of this distro, because as they say in the Mac world "it just works". The kernel compilation and other features in adminmenu are the cat's pajamas.

I'm already seeing early in this thread smug Ubuntu zealots pushing their agenda, and this turns me off completely. I'm not sure what the deal with these people is but I rate many of you right up there with some of the Gentoo people in terms of "self-assured righteous asshole factor". As far as my new distro goes, as one other poster says it is risky nowadays to rely on a distro from a one man shop with respect to continuity. I agree with this even though I love Slackware and Mepis. I don't have time for changing up distros on a whim any more, and on that note I'm jumping ship to Suse 10.0.

Re:one man wonder distros

[timeOday]

Then again Slackware has already outlasted a lot of commercial software vendors I've seen.

Re:one man wonder distros

[GoofyBoy]

>there's absolutely NO REASON to avoid one-person outfits. If the maintainer bows out, at worst you can support yourself,

That, by itself, is a great reason to avoid one-person outfits.

long live redunctionism

[Apostata]

As a former Libranet user (now running Kubuntu I might add), I find this statement to be poorly reasoned as well as off-topic. Just because they both are Debian based does not preclude that one has somehow usurped the other. Furthermore, Libranet has been around longer than Ubuntu, and the founder of Libranet recently passed away. Show some respect.

Re:adminmenu for debian/ubuntu?

[BrookHarty]

Good now that libranet is dead...maybe they'll open source their adminmenu tool so other distros can use it.

If it was in so much demand someone would of created an opensource version. Yast will be open source, Debian and Ubuntu both have projects. Most people seem to be fine with synaptic, apt-get and aptitude.

As for "Good" that libranet is dead is rather harsh, libranet showed how someone could take opensource software and create a business out of it.

Re:long live redunctionism

[oneeyedelf1]

As is said before, Ubuntu forks Debian, an ideal libranet was against.

Re:Not 1-man distros so much as derivitive distros

[jbolden]

Debian is a large scale (thousands of people) non profit with branches in many countries. Its less likely to fold than GE. It might gradually fall off but not fold. Further Debian is at this point a meta distribution. I'd say Debian folds when Linux like OSes are no longer needed or desired which means Ubuntu is pointless.

Re:So many distributions

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if there were only 3 or 4 big linux distros.

That would actually be pretty cool. It would allow for much more standardisation than we have now and would probably also help push Linux even further into the mainstream.

I think that the dozens of little distros out there actually hurt Linux more than helping it.

In answer to the question

[blackpaw]

But on a purely selfish level, is there anyone out there who can help save my favourite distribution?"

Unlikely - linux users are much bigger on mooching off other poeples work than actually doing it themselves, oh yeah and boasting about what radical open source freedom warriors they are.

You nailed it with the selfish word.