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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Libranet is a Linux distro cum P2P networking system, and as such had a lot of originality. Essentially, package distribution was over a distributed P2P networking system. You'd type in "lnpkg_load apache", and the system would then find all nearby peers with the Apache package, and install it.

By itself, this would be good, but what made it one better was a Gentoo type optimization for specific platforms. What this meant was that if you wanted different compile options, the Libranet package system would search out peers for a similar configuration before trying to compile the package itself. If it had to compile the package itself, it would register the fact it was doing this (so other peers, if they started to do the same thing, could avoid duplicating a work in progress), and once complete would share the optimized binary. All in all, this solved the "Spend three days "installing" the latest updates by recompiling them for a 5-10% speed increase" issue with Gentoo.

The P2P system was pretty popular as it wasn't limited to Linux packages. You could "install" movies and music and such too. Sharers were encouraged to distribute in the most raw format, so that, if, say, someone wanted a 30k/second version MPEG4 of "The Matrix", to fit on a PDA, they could get it using a similar system to the above, someone who'd already downloaded the file and converted it could then distribute the 30k/second version.

All in all, pretty awesome. Easily the best Linux distro AND the best P2P system out there. Shame it's going, but I guess with Hollywood and the music industry after anything that hints at freedom of expression, it's probably better for it to go before the lawsuits start flying!

This is one of the things that always bugged me...

[msimm]

Libranet Adminmenu, which is on par with Mandrake (Mandriva) Control Center and YAST

Is that every distro seems to feel it needs to reinvent the wheel. Both MDCC and YAST are fully open source, both mature products, both have been Q/A'ed and used by hundreds of thousands of users. But every distro I see seems to try either A) create its own clunky approach B) forge the niceties of configuration GUI's altogether in the old DIY approach.

This isn't the end of the world or anything, but I see configuration utilities as basic as DE's. Standarizing benifits the end user.