Libranet On The Rocks 152
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?"
I'm sorry, but who? (Score:2, Interesting)
Libranet will be missed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm sorry, but who? (Score:4, Interesting)
It has a very easy to use installer. As mentioned already it has great package management based on dpkg, apt and synaptic.
It makes a great desktop system out of the box; very little effort is needed to get everything to just work. It comes with all the typical goodies for a desktop (browser, email, office suite, etc) whether you pick Gnome or KDE as the default desktop.
All in all a very good "I think I'll install this for my Aunt Tillie" type of distribution.
I am sad to hear about it going away but on a purely practical note I think anyone who used this and wants to upgrade when Libranet is gone would do well to look to Ubuntu.
Re:one man wonder distros (Score:1, Interesting)
Ubuntu? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Libranet will be missed (Score:2, Interesting)
Libranet is a great distro for the non geek to get up and running with a debian box.
So is Xandros [xandros.com]. And although the previous edition costed around $40, it was still less than half the price of the last edition of Libranet, which if I'm not mistaken, is $90. But now the Xandros OCE is free: OCE = Open Circulation Edition. The business edition is for exactly that, businesses, and just a lot of extra megs on the hard disk for a home user (unless you really, really prefer Sun's Star Office over OpenOffice. org).
Dont' get me wrong, I tried Libranet and it was damn good. But Xandros is just as good and also has excellent compatibility with debian software, without costing nearly a hundred dollars. And support on Libranet wasn't too great when I tried it; I just wound up referred to their forums. Big deal, Xandros has a forum too, and the people there are both nice and helpful. For that much money I'd expect it to have soemthing over a free edition of Linux, but it doesn't. Now I'm not a free software zealot saying all distroes should be free, but $90? Sorry to sound insulting (I actually am sorry) because Libranet was pretty good, but it wasn't better than Xandros and I can't see paying that much when there's an alternative that's just as good and free. If it weren't for ignorance about Xandros I don't think Libranet would have gotten as far as it did.
Re:one man wonder distros (Score:1, Interesting)
Excuse me??
Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but I happen to be the sole creator/maintainer of my own distribution [kicks-ass.org], Ultima Linux, which is a one-man distro based on Slackware (yes, another one-man distro). Every single machine I own runs Ultima exclusively, including a full-time Web server [kicks-ass.org] which also hosts the project. Hmm, anything beyond hobby machines?
And for the record, last time I checked Slackware was still the oldest maintained distribution, whereas entire [wikipedia.org] companies [wikipedia.org] with more people than you can count have gone down after only a couple years.
As for Libranet, I'll admit that I never really looked into it much before, but it sounds like it is/was a really neat distribution. It's really too bad that it's going down, some of the features (especially the adminmenu and P2P system) must have been very unique and it would have been kind of cool to maybe tweak them to work with another system such as my own. Maybe that's what I'll use the free 10GB on my hard disk for.
By the way, Ubuntu is overrated. I've used it before; apt-get/dpkg was an absolute nightmare even for an advanced user like me, and I still have yet to find Ubuntu-compatible packages for stuff like wireless networking that I've come to take for granted with my Linux system. Just my 2 cents.
adminmenu for debian/ubuntu? (Score:0, Interesting)
LibraNet helped me overcome my fear of Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Having had trouble downloading Linux, I had ordered a stack of some 20 CD's or so of every Linux distro imaginable (to me at the time). LibraNet was one of them, sandwiched among Lycorix, Peanut Linux, Slack, FreeBSD, Pink Tie linux (Red Hat was going to sue unauthorized users of the term "Red Hat"), and the nine CD's of the main Debian 3.0 distro. For some reason I would keep getting errors installing (including the vaunted Mandrake with its "user-friendliness").
LibraNet was the first to install successfully, and make it easy to switch between KDE, GNOME, and ICEwm with the click of a button. It showed me what Linux was capable of. Even more impressive was the big button which simply said, "Recompile kernel". I never used it, but it was a shock to me that one could recompile the kernel as easily as clicking on a button. LibraNet impressed me with its multitude of screensavers. (Basically these were X screensavers, for which I have yet to find an equal that works with KDE --why are KDE screensavers so sluggish?)
LibraNet gave me the motivation to keep moving forward, to find what could be done with Linux. Kudos to the maintainers.
(I should sneak in a line or two about BasicLinux by Steven Darnold, who also showed what Linux was capable of, installed on a lowly 386 through a diskette.)
Re:adminmenu for debian/ubuntu? (Score:3, Interesting)
Honestly I find it sort of disappointing that more distro's haven't taken advantage of these open gifts we've been given. Fedora with its clunky up2date and yum solutions is a good example. Urpmi and Rpmdrake have solved the problems associated with rpm's ages ago. YAST is a strong second.
Re:Save it? Why not just give it away at this poin (Score:1, Interesting)
Libranet 3 was released early April 2005. It's now November 2005. That's about 7 months by my reckoning. So, how the fuck do you get 2 years out of that?
Most of the rests of the posts on this article are just crap. Ubuntu this, Ubuntu that. I couldn't give a rats ass about a Debian based distribution that isn't binary compatible with Debian. Sorry, no thanks. Ubuntu is SOOOOO overrated it isn't funny. Vastly overrated.
For those that posted about Xandros being better than Libranet - in your dreams. Since Xandros used a customised version of KDE, try upgrading it - and lose ALL of the Xandros customisations. Go on. XFM (Xandros File Manager)? Linspire was the same, a real bitch to update and keep in synch with Debian.
YAST? sure, go have a look at the Alioth packages. Make sure you're running a mixture of unstable/experimental, and be prepared to lose half of kde (and I'm running kde 3.4.2 from unstable btw). YAST has been opened for nearly 2 years now, and not that much has really happened with it. It's still a little project over at Alioth, Debian itself hasn't shown an official ounce of interest in it.
Slackware? It's a nice distro. But - Slackware really has packages, no repositories to worry about. Let me explain. You can grab a Slackware package from anywhere, and install it, doesn't matter where. Debian or Debian based distributions want you to point at a particular server side repository. That's a problem. You (generally) just can't go and grab any
I've been using Libranet since 2.7. I was using Windows XP and Debian Woody at the time. I liked it. When I had some spare cash a few months down the track, I bought 2.8.1. Used that for nearly two years. I'd still be most probably using it now except for ext3 crashing and having to spend a week pulling my data off it...I was one of the many Libranet 3 beta testers, so when 2.8.1 died, I bit the bullet and installed the beta that I'd been using, which has performed flawlessly since. Like many Libranet users, I help out on the forums as best as possible (given knowledge and time). This is pretty damn well sad news, as Libranet was the first distribution that I could just install and it worked out of the box. No fart assing around. It just worked. It was Debian compatible, and obviously used dpkg. RPM just sucks major I'm afraid to say. The sooner RPM is killed off, and every distro gathers around dpkg, the better Linux will be.
Anyways, I've said my piece, so I'll shove off.
Dave W Pastern