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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."
They're using JPEGs to show font rendering! LOL!
To me this seems realy quite good.
It sets up many of the thing a new linux user wants by default. (AA fonts for one)This is somthing that realy is a must 'cus theres nothing worse than trying to read crappy fonts, and its a big put off when you try and change.
I know things like this are relativly simple, but there not when you're new.
Mike
Ctrl-Z
If you wan't the latest and greatest (!) then you'd simply use the Sid branch of Debian. Sure probably lots of things don't work but oh you'd have the latest.
If you are more sane then you can simply track the Unstable branch. This is a good tradeoff for people who don't like the relatively old packages found in Stable.
In other words you have a choice. You can also use numerous unoffical apt-get sources for such stuff.
Stop thsi Debian myth now.
But it crashed on him, serveral times, during a partition/installation. So, this "review" constitutes him praising Anti Aliasing and a bunch of useless crap you can find in any other distro.
What I really don't understand is why some distros supply screenshots on their webpage, or why there is screenshots in reviews. If this was redhat, with it's special kde & gnome mixture thing (correct me if i am wrong), it would be OK, but this is just plain KDE 3.x. I am running Debian myself, and I don't see any difference in this KDE and the KDE I am using, okey there is a few new icons, but that would be the only thing.
And what is the big deal with Libranet beeing shipped with KDE 3.1 anyway? It's not that new and debian unstable has had it for some time now. The same with Linux 2.4.20, it has been stable for some time now, and it's not new! Still it is looking nice for the desktop with it's GUI frontends for package management, and maybe it has some other nice tools as well.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
I use FreeBSD and fonts are one of the reasons why I still do development on Windows with my computer. The fonts look 10 times better and are more pleasing to the eyes.
I use true type and anti aliagned fonts in X but they do not look as good as Microsoft's or Apple's.
If anyone knows of a website where I can download them that would be greatly appreciated.
http://saveie6.com/
Registry / .not / mono !
What the hell is driving you to MS? Alot of people don't like the direction you seem to want gnome to head. Claiming KDE is sorta less than free while you are busy trying to clone a patent mined technology produced by one of the most virulant software companies in recent memory is absurd to say least.
While LibraNet is certainly impressive, I must mention that Knoppix provides the "cutting edge" traits mentioned -- KDE 3.1, Linux-2.4.20-xfs, etc. -- with the bonus of the most mature automatic hardware detection algorithms in the x86 space.
:-)
And once you run knx-hdinstall, apt-get is more than happy to function normally.
Knoppix is very fun to see spread through schools; it's exponential growth at its finest
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I went to libranet site to see download options.
The Downloads are not free!!. This is certainly a first from a linux distro. I doubt i will pay to download isos!!
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
The reason is quite simple. As a Free Software follower, I don't want to use any software which doesn't give the freedoms/rights I want for myself and everyone else.
In less abstract terms: I don't want to agree to Reals license agreements or use their software, because it doesn't allow to do the things I should be allowed to do: study how it works, make changes to it and distribute derivative works (I would need the source code, and permission to use it for this to be possible). If you hang on a while I'll post another reply with some extracts from some of the EULAs.
I frequently get bashed here at slashdot for saying such things, but if don't have any control over the software (i.e. it's proprietary and/or non-free), then I don't want to use it -- no matter how good it is. If you want to know some of the reasons why non-free software is bad then go read up on GNU's philosophy section. Even if you find you don't agree with the GNU philosophy, you should know about it, because any GNU/Linux system (including Libranet) is build on and with GNU tools (and a lot of other of course, GNU should'nt be getting all the credit).
Debian does not force you to take this approach; you choose to.
;)
If you wan't bleeding edge, use unstable/testing.
Yes -- Debian stable has programs that are (in some cases) slightly out of date, and do not have the features of newest releases. The clue is in the name, though; they have been rigourously tested for stability. If you want to sacrifice stability (aimed more at servers) for features (aimed more at desktops), use unstable/testing. You don't even have to have all programs as unstable/testing -- you can choose which ones to pin where.
When will people stop criticising Debian for being conservative when it isn't; Debian does have bleeding edge versions of most of the packages available, in the unstable/testing repositories. You *just* have to tell it to use them.
Now I'll have my coffee and moan less
Manta
Is Windows ready for the server?
Is Windows ready for the shell?
Is Windows ready for the 99.999%?
Is Windows ready for open standarts?
Is Windows ready for taking the competition with the best OS in the world?
and you can find it here.
It didn't fail because of 533 MHz and 128 MB RAM, it failed because of some incompatible hardware. Thats's a big difference, and claiming that Libranet draws too much resources is simply ridiculous.
Be careful with your quoting as well. Your mix of article quotes and personal comments is really misleading.
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."
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.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
"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.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
My computer is an Athlon 875mhz with 512mb of ram & 7200rpm hdd - this should be fine as a desktop computer for a long time in theory, but WinXP from 2001 would run slowly on it, and Linux distros run like a dog on it. I know there is custom compiling and the like, but I can't be bothered and it shouldn't be needed anyway. No computer I've seen has been faster to use from an end-user standpoint than my DX4-100 with Windows 3.11.
To need such a ghz computer to just boot up at a decent speed is nuts - there was a time a decade ago when Unix had different principals, when hackers were hackers and not just selfish fun-centric ultra ghz 20somethings, when many a Unix had a lighter footprint than Windows (and Windows was feather light back then compared with now).
Should I care about a new distro coming out? When I know it will run slowly on my computer and I will be forced to upgrade all the time because Linux is always needing security patches and the software turnover rate such that nobody without broadband can keep up. And if I used Linux fulltime, that even if I got a brand new computer, that I'd be forced to upgrade it every couple of years to run the thing at the same speed because Linux bloats so fast. If Linux's objective on the desktop is to do things 'right', then it is as bad at that objective as Windows is as a server OS, perhaps far worse. I used to think geeks were out of touch, but I now think most just don't even care.
The Linux community aren't exactly top of the pops in the corporate world, much in fact due to their rather immature birdlike mascot.
:)
Immature? Rubbish. It reflects what the linux developers are doing perfectly. Not trying to be corporate, not trying to be 'top of the pops'. Simply making cool stuff because they enjoy doing it. It's upto the various distros to present that processional 'corporate' face. And they are doing it just fine thank you very much.
Considering this, and the recent problems Linux have had with corporate penetration, I can't see why domain names like Mad Penguin are chosen.
Maybe because the owner of the domain liked the name? *shrug*
The only effect is to drive away potential serious customers.
Again, this is a distro specific thing. Redhat and Debian both are very well presented. Presentation is not the problem, not by a long shot.
You seem to be suffering from the misconception that Linux is some kind of business "product" which must be "marketed" to "customers". Please disabuse yourself of this notion. Linus chose the fat penguin logo because it was cute and funny. He doesn't give a dang if it makes the project seem less "professional", and neither do most of the rest of us penguinistas.
If some company (redhat, lindows, libranet, suse) wants to package and sell the work of the community to their customers, then the marketing of Linux is their problem; don't try to foist it off on us, because we could not care less.
In short, Linux is not a business! So don't expect us to behave like businesspeople.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Sorry, unstable/testing isn't really cutting edge either. It took 9 frigging months for Xfree 4.2 to appear in Unstable, and it took even longer for KDE3!
:)
Yes, and that's where you lack the background context about why the above 2 things took a long time.
Incidentally, Debian is more unstable/cutting edge than you think. It has had gcc 3.2.3 pre-release versions for months, and the glibc maintainers seem to regularly do updates from CVS. The samba in unstable is 2.999alpha23. The new module utils for kernel 2.5 are already packaged for unstable as well... are you running 2.5?
The thing is that Debian is a de-facto portability test for XFree86, because Debian releases on over 10 architectures. The maintainer for the XFree86 packages doesn't package newer versions until he has them working on all architectures, and this takes time. I do find it annoying, but a laudable goal (it's not like new versions of XFree86 really give me that much anyway).
As for KDE, this was delayed further because of the transition to gcc 3.2, which had yet another different and incompatible ABI to gcc 3.0. It was felt it wasn't worth putting KDE in, only to have to go through a painful packaging transition for 3.2. Instead, the KDE maintainers just opted to wait for the transition to start before they entered Debian.
See, just because some things are slower than you expected doesn't mean the rest of unstable isn't in fact quite up-to-date, maybe more than you'd like
I'm well aware of the reasons for the delay. And guess what? I don't care for their reasons! All I care is that is the software in there or isn't it. And in this case, it wasn't. Other distros had them, Debian did not. So the people who say that Unstable is cutting-edge, are simply wrong. Perhaps it would be closer to the truth is they said "Unstable is more or less current, unless some big and important packages are againg being held back indefinitely because they are implementing some changes".
Yes, they were migrating to GCC3 and that was the cause for the delay. So what? fact remains that the software was delayed and that means that Unstable is not bleeding edge. That is a FACT. And that means that one should not do the "Debian unstable is bleeding edge" party-line if it's not true.
Of course, every other distro were also migrating to GCC3 back then, yet they were running the new software alot sooner than Debian was...
Perhaps other parts of Unstable are more current, but again: I don't care! I don't care if Unstable has YetAnotherApp0.05 whereas other distros still have YetAnotherApp0.04, if big and important packages are delayed. And Xfree and KDE are pretty damn big and important in my book!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Uh, Knoppix 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.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
...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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.