A Penguin in the Orchard

Libranet Install

I’m running a Libranet install this afternoon, in preparation for review in Penguin Shell starting Wednesday. I’ve had a bit of recurring trouble with the CD-ROM drive on Cerebrum this afternoon, but have managed to finally get to a boot screen for the install.

Libranet is based on Debian. I’ve reviewed an earlier version of Libranet and liked the distribution quite a lot. It seems to nicely bridge the gap between Debian and more conusmer-oriented distros, featuring an easy text-based installer and all the well-known Deb tools, such as apt-get.

The installer for Libranet 2.7 is still text based. The first item is a brief description of how to navigate in the text installer, followed by keyboard configuration. Next is a screen detailing the hard drive preparation options: Automatic partitioning and layout, using the entire hard drive for Libranet; Automatic layout, for use on a drive that already contains a Linux installation; Expert, using fdisk and other tools.

I selected the Expert option and was able to quickly set up /, /boot, swap, and /home simply by using the up and down arrows. It looks like there’s no real knowledge of fdisk or the other tools necessary. I selected ReiserFS for the filesystem. Less than 30 seconds after writing the partition table, the drive layout was complete.

The system then mounts the CD-ROM and automatically installs the base system. I think this is a more sound approach than I saw with Slackware in the last install. Slack only noted the items that are requried in the install, but didn’t install them until the user started tye full install. In other words, Libranet breaks out the installation of the base system and the kernel from the installation of the other apps.

Next is an option to allow Libranet to handle the boot chores. When asked if I wanted to let Libranet handle booting, I selected yes and the bootloader was installed. I didn’t get a choice of bootloaders, so we’ll have to see which is the default in Libranet.

Setting the time zone is next. It’s done via the familiar text selection box. Once again, it’s quick and easy.

Next up is the creation of a boot disk. I always write a boot disk, just in case …

After boot disk creation, the system needs to reboot into the base Libranet system. I’ll post this chapter, and be back in a bit.