On Saturday 19 May 2007, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote: > On Sat, May 19, 2007 at 03:12:51PM -0400, Hal Vaughan wrote: > > We had a problem on the Libranet list where a number of us got into > > some serious and deep discussions about religion and politics. Not > > one person was being disrespectful or calling names, but there were > > a few people that never answered any questions and just seemed to > > lurk who complained. We solved that by creating an OT group that > > still goes well today. Some people ask for technical help, but we > > have a lot of discussions over politics, religion, and other > > topics. > > Ironically, this reply would, possibly, be off-topic on Debian lists > :) > > You mentioned Libranet - I asked a prominent UK Linux vendor to > consider removing Libranet from his list of CDs because it was dead > upstream and had no update possibility. Libranet was a very good > Debian derivative - is there still a "Libranet community" and should > someone be looking to find what made Libranet special and try to > bring that to Debian for new users? > > Andy - interested in all Debian derivatives - but who comes back to > running and advocating Debian every time.
I had several issues with Libranet from a few months or more before 3.0 came out. It was a great effort done by a Father and son team and, at it's time, it was quite ground breaking. They were the first (that I know of) Debian based distro to simplify the install process and make it easier for a non-techie to install Debian. It also included an all-in-one admin program to handle some configuration issues and to easily install Flash and a few other proprietary programs. For it's time, it was an amazing piece of work. I've heard both good and bad about the final version of Libranet and I won't say much about it, since it came out not long before the Father on the team died and I just don't want to dig up any issues from that period. However, I do not think Libranet would have lasted much longer. They were charging over $70 a copy and Mepis and Ubuntu where out, both for free, and both offering everything Libranet did and, with Ubuntu's case, more. Even if Libranet had dropped their price to $30 a disk, I don't know if they could have survived when there were other distros based on Debian that were known to be easy and were not fee based. Hal -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
