Windows Anonymous

On yet another jaunt through DistroWatch (link to the right of this article) in serach of new stuff to break try out and review here, I found this. At first glance it looked like an amateur 3rd-gen spin by someone's college-bound slacker, but as it turns out this is "real" Linux, as in source-compiled. Some people may never understand why that is a good thing.

Further research shows that Lunar started out as a fork of Sorcerer Linux, another source-based distro. Both download current source code and compile a package optimized for that particular install (sound familiar?) without any drama. In fact the install disk doesn't actually install an OS so much as a kernel and compilation toolchain; think of it as Linux From Scratch, only a little more automated.

Starting up, the behavior is a lot like Arch Linux or Frugalware; ncurses-based, just-the-facts install. In fact, as mentioned all you get is the compiling tools and a choice of 2 precompiled kernels; a third option allows you to compile a kernel of your own. This stuff is serious. Once installed, you're first admonished to ping Google, just like in Arch. You're then told to do

man lfirsttime

to get the show on the road. It will tell you, among other things, that the liveCD is not a fully-featured system. It will also tell you to ensure your networking is up and get your coretools updated. This is done by choosing between lunar, which is the stable branch, and theedge, which is the unstable branch. Once you get the proper names and syntax down, anyone used to Arch, Slack, or Gentoo will have it figured out. The package repo where the coretools get their package data is called appropriately enough, moonbase. Be careful, though; the files that tell the core tools how to put stuff together are referred to as modules, so expect some confusion. Also, upgrading/installing scrolls the terminal silly instead of updating a single bar or number so if you get a desktop environment going on this, make sure the buffer has a whole bunch of lines in it. The first update you're expected to do is the coretools, which will result in an insane amount of compiling so have the caffeine ready.

Oh, and it pulls in dependencies. Just thought I'd share that. In fact, it tells you when dependencies are optional, tells you what they're for, and asks if you want to install them. How's that for control?

Now, a potential downside to this is the compiling can be time-consuming, especially on an older machine. This is not, of course, going to be a resurrect-your-old-P3-box type of distro anyway; unless you know some commandline-fu you're better off grabbing the latest Zenwalk or something similar. Repurposing for a file server will do nicely. Also, there's a 64-bit version. I personally ran into a problem with the install manager not getting the URL right for libpng; more specifically, I couldn't find which text/config file I needed to edit so I could put the right URL in. Downloading the tar.gz myself didn't work because I didn't know where to put it. I ran out of time tweaking it to get this review up in a reasonable amount of time; there's a bug report and a fix, and I left it at that.

This thing is neat. The iso is ~500MB, making it bigger than the Arch (360MB) or the Gentoo-minimal (101MB) iso images so there's no bargain if you're on dial-up. It does install nicely on VirtualBox, however you might brush up on how to switch between tty's in VBox, as you'll need the internal documentation at first; this isn't quite like the others which have a ton of online documentation. In all, it's a fun distro where you can get some nuts-and-bolts knowledge of Linux without a lot of resources.

Lunar-Linux: http://www.lunar-linux.org/index.php