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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?"
Just curious, but what is noteworthy about Libranet? Is it an especially well balenced linux distro?
Libranet is a great distro for the non geek to get up and running with a debian box. I found it to be a great learning distro that put awesome tools, including a kernel compiler, into the hands of the average person. Without it, I would not have had the successes with linux I have had. There is nothing it can do that you can't do elsewhere, and it mix of stable, testing, and unstable may put some folks off, but I feel it is an invaluable tool for a niche part of the linux community. Libranet will be missed.
Mepis is in that category too, with seemingly tight-fisted control (aka dotmepis debacle)
is a Debian fork as I understand it...not pure Debian like Libranet.
"That is why you should never rely on one-man-wonder distros like libranet or slackware for anything beyond hobby machines."
Excuse me??
Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but I happen to be the sole creator/maintainer of my own distribution, 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 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 companies 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.
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
Good now that libranet is dead...maybe they'll open source their adminmenu tool so other distros can use it.
Although not a LibraNet user (I've been using Mandrake since 9.0, now switching over to Ubuntu), I have to acknowledge LibraNet's help in getting me past Linux's steep learning curve.
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.)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
How the fuck does a comment like this get a +2? It's blatantly wrong, and the person obviously hasn't done an ounce of research to validate his facts. No wonder /. moderation really is very badly fucked. No wonder many people trash /. moderation. Since my karma is negative (for simply posting actually factual comments that others just simply dislike and mod down for inappropriate reasons) I really couldn't give a fuck what you fucked up moderators (or whatever you want to call yourselves) think.
.deb file and install it. RPM has the same problems as well.
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
Slashdot can go and get fucked.