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?"

Comments

Re:I'm sorry, but who?

[just_another_sean]

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.

LibraNet helped me overcome my fear of Linux

[KWTm]

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.)