Libranet Linux Review

By Jim on September 6th, 2003

Before getting into this review, we have to confess something – we recently fell in love with Red Hat 9. It functioned so well that we opted to use it as our regular desktop OS…until now.

In our last review of Libranet, we carped about a few things. We’re happy to report that version 2.8 of Libranet addresses some of our complaints, making it a much better system overall.

As great as Red Hat is, Libranet has won our hearts again and taken back its place as our preferred Linux desktop. So lets take a look at this recent distro, with a focus on what’s new.

We installed Libranet 2.8 on the Compaq that already had Windows XP and Red Hat 9 on it. We blew away the Red Hat installation and put Libranet in its place. Libranet uses Grub as the bootloader and we had no problems with using our system as a dual boot.

The installation took about 35 minutes or so. We were very pleasantly surprised to notice that we can now choose individual packages during the installation. In the previous version we were limited to choosing entire categories. Kudos to the Libranet folks adding this in, as it’s a big help to those of us who want to pick out individual packages.

Another nice touch: Libranet asked us if we wanted to have write access to our mounted Windows partitions. For many users, this can be a helpful feature. However, we still recommend adding a separate partition on multi-OS systems for files that you wish to share among operating systems. It’s just neater and cleaner.

Read the Rest