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Woo hoo! The moment of truth. I logged into Libranet as the non-root user (always a smart approach) that I had created during the second stage install. Nice looking interface! NVidia popup and all, well that is the price of 3D, I suppose. So, the question that is burning in your mind has got to be - which Window Manager does Libranet default to? First, let me say that Libranet comes with lots of Window Managers - KDE, Gnome, IceWM, Flux Box, WM, TWM, etc. It defaults to IceWM. I was unfamiliar with IceWM, however, I thought that I would give it a shot. I figured that the Libranet folks must have a reason for picking it.

I went ahead and set up my Samsung ML-1450 network laser printer, this required that I select ML-6000, no big. The last little bit of configuration was raising the IGain on my soundcard, for some reason all Linuxes have low volume on my soundcard.

I then updated the AdminMenu, Libranet's incredibly well organized administration interface.

I clicked the Security Updates button in the AdminMenu and got all the latest security hotfixes - 8MB, about a minute.

The last 2 things that I did on my initial login? I added my True Type Fonts (AdminMenu again) and selected a pkde2 theme, so I would know what those button thingies on the toolbars did.

Well I have spent the time since downloading the distribution, banging on my Libranet system. I have been unable to crash the system, no shock there. I have been unable to crash X, this is a little more impressive. One test that I like to perform on every new system that I setup, is to start every application in the main menus at once and observe the performance, or in the case of my other OS, non-performance of the system. Libranet maintained responsiveness during this test, quite a feat.

I used wine to run X-News:
http://xnews.newsguy.com

Wow, Windows apps on Linux! and I did not crash X with this one either.

I ran the applications and then I ran them some more and there were plenty to choose from. I played games, I ran compiles, and I ran every Internet application in the distribution (well, I think I did, like I said PLENTY to choose from).

Libranet comes with a slew of fine applications, my favorites are:

For a more complete list of applications, goto:
http://www.distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=Libranet

Screenshots are available here:
http://www.libranet.com/screenshots.html

I had a couple of questions that I could not answer myself, so I wrote to tech support and they were quick and courteous. Not only that, they answered the questions! See below for the Questions, with Answers.

The look of Libranet is comparable to Red Hat or Mandrake, True Type fonts and clean Anti-Aliasing give the interface a polished look that many distributions lack, out of the box. I was required to install the fonts (some licensing issue, surely), however, Adminmenu centralized the process and made it painless.

Libranet has something for everyone. Over the past few weeks my usage profile has morphed several times and Libranet has been there every step of the way. I started as a reviewer, bells and whistles galore... Next, I played Joe User, could I open that Microsoft PowerPoint presentation? Sure enough, OpenOffice to the rescue (ditto on Word and Excel), word to the wise, get OpenOffice 1.1 for even better interoperability. Next, critical developer - vi (or emacs) and gcc will take you a long way, but I sure wish there were some Visual Studio competitors freely available, KDevelop not withstanding. Komodo 2.5 from ActiveState works beautifully on Libranet, but Komodo is not that inexpensive. Finally, after all the work - I took on the game player role, rock on! I loaded up Quake III Arena, wow! Was I ever glad that my NVidia card was supported well. The responsiveness of the game was impressive. I tried 30 or so of the games that came with Libranet and although I liked them and they worked well, none were as polished as Arena. My windows version of Unreal worked quite well under wine, though, and it is as polished. Every game that I played worked as I expected, well. All in all, you can wile away as many hours playing games on Libranet as you like. It comes with a very large number of games, games for X, for Gnome and games for KDE.

In terms of overall user experience, Libranet is a blast - from start to finish. The one thing that I would change, if it was up to me, are the menus. The menus can be somewhat confusing. There appears to be some redundancy and overlap, for instance, the Games sub menu can be found in the main menu as well as several other sub menus. I would like to see the menus redone in such a way as to eliminate that redundancy.

Libranet 2.8.1 is a breath of fresh air. Amazingly easy to install, stable as a rock and easy to update. Their customer support was fast, knowledgeable and helpful. I would recommend this Debian based Linux distribution to anyone, novice or expert.

Q. IceWM is the default, how do I accelerate the mouse?
A. There is currently no graphical method of setting mouse acceleration in IceWM, but you could add the command:
xset m 2 4 To: ~/.libranet/startup_programs
Where in the example above 2 is the acceleration, and 4 the threshold.

Q. How do I troubleshoot and or configure the time server client? Using adminmenu, I try to sync the time with the noaa server and get the error:
Fail: connect: Connection refused
A. The NOAA time server that Adminmenu used for time synchronization became inaccessible recently. We resolved this with an update to the Libranet Adminmenu.

1. "Overview and Installation"
2. "Usage and Conclusion"