Re: rampant offtopic and offensive posts to debian-user
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
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