Canada’s leading distro, Libranet is not yet one of the “big guns” in the Linux world, but it has all the potential to compete with the best. A commercial distribution based on Debian, Libranet attempts to improve on Debian’s fine features by adding excellent hardware detection, easy system administration, and an up-to-date default configuration of software packages.
Unlike two other commercial Debian distros, Lindows and Xandros, Libranet goes light on graphics – it is built for speed. Furthermore, it offers a great deal of installation and configuration options, and a generous supply of included apps.
Those who want to take Libranet further can use Debian’s much-praised apt-get system of package management to produce a bleeding edge system. Those who like Debian should love Libranet, the only “gotcha” being that Libranet isn’t free (as Debian is). Nevertheless, Libranet is considered good value by its growing fan club, so let us take a look and see just what this increasingly popular distro has to offer.
Read the review at DistroWatch.
This review is really worth a read. This guy can write. You can’t say this for all the review authors, who feel the’ve to share there opinion with the crowd 😉
Additionally LibraNet seems to be quite cool, but for now I am very happy with my Mdk 9.1.
I didn’t test libranet but with the screenshot I saw, the configuration tool seem a little bit outdated (gtk1)
is it true?
satisfied users of other distros like RH and Mandy (and even windows) ought to try this at least once. On the other hand, the Debian folks have worked hard to make their vanilla version (Sarge and Sid) easy to use. “Linux that just works” is a phrase that seems to have been borrowed from a review of Xandros 1.0 which also just works. If you try this product, also try Woody 3.0 (Debian) because they two are frighteningly similar
When it comes to usibility/function, if the tool works and does what it is designed to do….Who care’s what it looks like? It is just an application.
If i want usability i have the command line, when you have a graphical’s configuration tool, it have to be a little bit more then just usable.
I think it’s important to have beautiful graphical application in linux because the power is allready there…
Great review despite the minor nit in the subject
line.
True. Point taken.
On another note I have used Libranet 2.7 and while I believe it’s a great product I’m still not sold on it as a value to *purchase*. With that said…I could pay for say Lindows or Xandros. Libranet has pretty much the same focus but still is not as that level. One could asy that they are not competing against those mentioned but all are based on Debian and are all commercial. So, the way I see it, Libranet is (whether they like it or not) in competition with them.
All that said Libranet is a good solid distro. I jsut think that all they have done is rewritten the install and written a pretty good config tool. To me it’s not worth the money, but that’s all for the individual to decide.
I bought the download version of 2.8 a couple of days ago and I must say, I’m impressed. It found all my hardware on the first go and everything worked right away.
The only thing I had to do was recompile the kernel for SMP support, but with Adminmenu that was a couple of clicks, a few keystrokes and, of course, the usual wait. It asked me if I wanted to reboot, I said yes, and all was well.
The fonts look good, and overall the desktop seems responsive (for Linux). I haven’t yet found anything that really annoys me about it.
I’m sure it won’t be long before someone posts about how Libranet is evil because it costs money and it’s really nothing more than Debian with a better installer. In reality though, a lot of effort has very obviously gone into this distro. They seem to concentrated on making sure it worked right, rather than glitzing it up.
All the little niggles that drove me away from Redhat, Mandrake and Suse have been taken care of. Things are where you’d expect them to be and everything works, at least as far as I’ve seen over the last couple of days.
To me, it was well worth the $65 I paid. Adminmenu itself is worth that for the aggravation it eliminates.
As yet another BeOS refugee (You didn’t think we were going to get through a thread without someone mentioning BeOS, did you?)I originally picked up Libranet to give me something to play with until Zeta comes out. From what I’ve seen so far, though, I may finally be done with BeOS for good.
Anyway, to sum up, in my humble opinion, Libranet 2.8 is good.
I think that (X)Adminmenu is a very strong selling point for Libranet. Despite it ugly and outdated looks, it have nice options like buttons to download and install automagically the RealPlayer plug-in, NVidia drivers and stuff like that. Seems like even the DeCSS is preloaded.
But I think that choosing IceWM as default window manager isn´t a very wise decision. Although I do like IceWM a lot for its speed and small footprint, it doesn´t offer basic stuff like easy menu editing (OK! Neither Gnome 2.2, but… :-)), icons in the desktop, etc. I know that there are small utilities do edit menus and such (I have used them in the past), but I´m not sure if those applications are intuitive enough.
Personally, I think they could opt for XFCE as default DE, since it is very slim and responsive, too. And with XFCE 4.0 using GTK 2, they can offer a really beautiful and fairly functional desktop, with fonts anti-aliased everywhere.
Overall, Libranet seems very pleasing.
Regards,
DeadFish Man
The screenshots at Libranet’s website don’t show 2.8’s improved fonts.Since so many have pointed out you can’t (except for the 2.0 version) try out Libranet for free, many will be using these to get an impression of Libranet.
They should should be updated to show the new superior fonts and make a good impression.
I understand that Libranet can’t be downloaded for free. But does anyone know what it’s licensed under? Obviously most of the software is GPL/Mozilla license/etc.; what about the additions Libranet has made? I have no problem paying for software, but though I’d like to try this distro out, I’d rather not spend money on non-free software if I can avoid it.
I purchased the 2.7 download edition and it seems to be a blend of Woody and Sid. What stopped me from continuing to use it is: after I got KDevelop all set up and running, I couldn’t build anything because of lack of the headers and libs, basically the devel package for Xfree. With Synaptic, the only version I saw available was specifically for XFree 4.2, that meant I had to roll back to that version of XFree, something I’m not ready to do, and I think by doing so I would also be giving up font anti-aliasing.
I suppose I should have just waited for the right packages to be released. But I already have everything good to go on my Mandrake machine. Once Debian and its children distros get updated with more current software I wouldn’t mind giving it a second try. I think Debian really is great, although I can’t really subscribe to their ideaology of using older but tried and proven software. I just think that if other distros can do it why not Debian? Very seldom do I see any apps in Mandrake crash and they’re all packages in what the Debian community consider “unstable”.
and the debian stable branch is build to never crash.
The fonts and GNOME desktop in Libranet 2.8 look amazing. This is such a kick-ass distro.
Just a damn good distro… the one that finally made me say “maybe I can live without windows” on my desktop (Libranet has been my server OS for a couple years now)
After reading so many good comments from people, it seems Libranet is worth paying?
Can anyone tells me what exactly are better in Libranet than in Mandrake/RH besides the dependency problem?
Font AA in Mozilla by default. Not so in Madrake 9.1
I had to recompile Mozilla myself to get font AA and even then not all text was anti-aliased. Someone pointed me to a cooker ftp mirror where I got 1.4a and now everything is AA but 1.4a has some quirks.
I agree that fonts in RH and Mandrake are really pissing me off. I have a LCD monitor, and the fonts all look “colorful”. So it will be better in Libranet? Maybe I will get it tonight… still not sure if I should bet my money on it.
“still not sure if I should bet my money on it.”
Well, the good news is that Libranet has a 30 day money back guarantee, no questions asked. So, try it out and see what you think.
(btw, I have an LCD monitor too. Did you play with the sub-pixel hinting settings? There is a place you change this in both KDE 3.1 and GNOME2. It made a world of difference and got rid of the “colored” pixels in my text. Good luck.)
Contrary to the common belierf that this window manager is not visually pleasing, Libranet’s version is fully configured and truly does provide an equal footing between KDE and GNOME. IceWM is the only window manager out there (to my knowledge) that can be operated and configured from the keyboard. If you haven’t done so, give this IceWM an honest try! I think it shows Libranet’s ingenuity that they made it so easy to use.
Debian that just works? Debian does “just work” if you know what you are doing… perhaps the author should rename his article “Libranet: Debian for morons” or something to the same effect.
I find it insulting that people constantly bash the usability of Debian. I have found it to be the one OS that doesn’t get in my way. I simply tell it what to do, and it does it. Why is this such a hard concept for people to come to grips with? An OS that actually does what its told shouldn’t be knocked for not doing what people don’t like in other OS’s.
People need to decide what they want in an operating system, then stick to it. Debian is the most perfect operating system I have found to date. I have tried many others, but honestly, nothing comes even close.
(perhaps this veiw will change, I am trying Gentoo this weekend… as I said, Debian is the most perfect, it is still not perfect, so my search continues…)
(Yes I do know that Libranet is based on Debian, however its about as bloated as Xandros or Lindows, that, for me, is a deal breaker. I don’t want the installer to install 50 applications I don’t even use..)
Debian that just works? Debian does “just work” if you know what you are doing…
For many users, that’s a very big “IF”…
A very good idea I think. Even now some distros fail
to get X working right, it’s still the main stumbling
block for me, and a pain when it’s done last, after
all that time installing packages. All distros should
offer to try X first, if that fails I go no further.
> This is an unusual approach – most installers save Xwindows configuration for last.
Debian is far from perfect. Debian Stable is quite stable, but it comes with hopelessly outdated packages like KDE 2.2.2! Debian unstable is so unstable that it is almost unusable. You have to read the usenet to find out that you have to downgrade(!) packages like libstdc++5 to make apt-get work.
Maybe it is because debian packagres prefer gnome and dislike kde, but using kde with debian is a royal PITA. KDE packages are either old or broken or both.
I’ve used many distros over the years(including Debian) but Libranet is sim ply awesome. It just stays out of your way and lets you get things done.
What an extrodinarily unimformed and completely incorrect statement. Xandros picks *one* application for each task. It fits on *one* cd and is the most *NON-BLOATED* major distro I’ve ever use.
Maybe some people have the answers for the following questions?
1.
I didn’t see an option for installing a package which is sitting in a directory, that is, a package which one already downloaded?? Can one easily due this with apt-get or Libranet’s package management? Sadly, I’ve always stayed away from Debian and never tried apt-get.
2.
Is the cd-rw by default configured to use the SCSI emulation?
I got the impression that it is not.
3.
How advanced is the network configuration. Can one save different types of sessions? What about wireless cards and pcmcia Ethernet cards?
4.
Does the kernel have ACPI support?
One final comment. Using icewm doesn’t do much good if one is planning on using gnome2/kde3 apps. When such an app is launched in a plain window manager, all the servers required for the app to function are fired up anyway.
Also, it appears that one has to manually delete the symbolic links when editing the services which are lauched at boot time. A small app which handles this shouldn’t be difficult to code.
You can install local packages by directly invoking dpkg (the actual installation utility that apt-get and dselect wrap around) like this:
dpkg -i package_name
There are a number of good projects (synaptic is mentioned most often) that provide a wrapper for apt-get if the command line isn’t the most comfortable. Feta is a project to simplify all of the command line options for apt if you are happy with the cl but not the syntax of apt.
During the Libranet install (and I’ve only used 2.0 so this is probably slicker in subsequent versions) the installer asks you if you want to set up CD-R devices to do SCSI emulation. It even asks if you want all CD devices to do SCSI emulation.
I’ve used the older free version of Libranet on my laptop (Toshiba Tecra PIII 366) with a Xircom CardBus Ethernet card and discover just finds and installs the correct modules on boot. Again, this is an older version so I’m sure this has improved since then.
Hope some of that helps.
Maybe you didn’t know but it’s possible to install KDE3.1
on stable debian ( woody 3.0 ) ..I did it and it flyes..
Just add apt sources that offers kde3 and voila…
debian with kde 3.1
I have tried Knoppix and used it in effect as a debian installer, poped the cd in, booted in to KDE, open a shell and type “knx-hdinstall” answer a few questions and thats it, you can even surf the web while it’s being installed! After it’s done you get a fully configured Debian system with all the bells and whistles everything configured hardware detected and all.
Best of all it’s free.
Libranet sounds alright, but I’ve never seen a simpler install than knoppix considering that what you get is a fully configured, ready to go Debian.
I was very interested in Libranet. Then I saw how much it cost. So, I tried out 2.0 because, well, it’s free. I installed it without a hitch, updated the packages with apt, and in the end I realized it consumed less resources than my hand-picked Debian 3.0 Woody stable install.
How humiliating. :]
I’ve seen a couple people here mention how unstable and unusable Sid is, and how old and boring Woody is…but there’s always ‘testing.’ And, if you want the cutting edge, heh, I wouldn’t pick Debian to begin with. I picked Debian because I was tired of SuSE breaking. I don’t even use KDE or Gnome, so that’s not even an issue for me.
The only problem I’ve had with 2.0 was sound being broken in Gnome, and when you update CUPS or printtool with apt you can’t manage them with the Xadminmenu anymore. It almost detected my videocard, but guessed the wrong amount of RAM. It found my printer, but it wouldn’t print. Libranet also installs a lot of software during the initial install if you let it. And it’s kind of a pain to go through and get rid of all the crap you’ll never use. I would hope that these minor niggles are fixed in the newest version. From the reviews I’ve read, it seems to be true.
I’d definitely recommend this for someone thinking about SuSE or Red Hat. It’s not as easy, but it’s getting there. You won’t have to deal with rpm’s idiosyncrasies, and it’s a helluva lot faster.