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Libranet On The Rocks

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the end-of-the-road dept.

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?"

7 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. I'm sorry, but who? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

    1. Re:I'm sorry, but who? by just_another_sean · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's Debian based first off, always a good thing :)

      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.

      --
      Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
  2. Libranet will be missed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Libranet will be missed by Mistshadow2k4 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Libranet is a great distro for the non geek to get up and running with a debian box.

      So is Xandros. 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.

      --
      I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
  3. Ubuntu? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    is a Debian fork as I understand it...not pure Debian like Libranet.

  4. LibraNet helped me overcome my fear of Linux by KWTm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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]
  5. Re:adminmenu for debian/ubuntu? by msimm · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Isn't YAST already open? I know Mandrake/Mandriva has a solid GPL commitment.

    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.

    --
    Quack, quack.