A Lunar review

[Zbigniew Luszpinski]

> On 8/4/05, Florin Braescu <florin at lunar-linux.org> wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> >   There is a small review about Lunar Linux here
> > http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/07/25/1319212 . The conclusions
> > are interested to be checked and worked out.
>
> a poor review. sofar and csm already ranted about it and larted
> Preston St. Pierre more than once.

Yes. The author of review neither mentioned which ISO version he was using nor 
system config - this is basic error. Next mistake was category: can not 
understand why lunar was assigned to desktop, multimedia, newbie category not 
server, performance, admin. I installed lunar few months ago (ISO 1.4.0) and 
did not find any module compilation or installation errors - I was surprised 
about that, expected errors (you know, not popular distro, small, etc.). The 
first packages I installed was X.org and KDE. Works like a charm. When I 
found lunar first time there was information that lunar is in general 
designed for server and admin use. I remember that had problem with SATA 
which was immediately resolved by nice people on IRC (thank you!). I do not 
know where the author got these URLs looking for help. Making desktop lunar 
is easy but require some work, but nobody can blame developers about this - 
lunar is designed for servers so if someone tries to make desktop with 
multimedia must expect to put some work in it. I think that lunar (thanks to 
fresh packages and compilation with mmx, sse) is more multimedia friendly 
than mandrakes (i586 binary) I used before thru years. According to 
documentation lunar is for servers and experienced admins - so how someone 
can expect user friendlines, hw auto detection? What for should be auto 
detection during install if you manually configure kernel? Only HDD should be 
detected to copy data to disk. useradd is described in all basic *nix books 
so why expecting other commands? The x configuration is auto made using X 
configuration tools, so why lunar should do this? Of course installation of 
packages are minimal. This is very good for server or users looking for 
performance desktop. I must say that can neither reproduce any of erros the 
author mentioned nor confirm bugs which in my opinion are lunar's features 
which like and won't change.

The only quirks I had was with KDE. First time KDE must be run as root to 
generate files in tmp, and startx do not launch KDE, a command must be add to 
X config first. But admins know such things so, like with udev config, these 
complications appeared because of my ignorance not bugs.

Conclusion:
Think I should add these KDE quirks to Tips&Tricks on lunar www page.

There are some things to improve (like in any other OS or distro) but we are 
here to detect and fix them. (Sometimes in rude way, like me :-( )

diff for review:
-Linar Linux's package
+Lunar Linux's package

greets,
Zbigniew 'zbiggy' Luszpinski