TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Much like most of the distributions that I come to me via recommendation, Lunar was out of left field. I'd never heard of it and didn't understand why it existed.

After reading the introduction article (which is offered as part of the install process, not unlike Gentoo's documentation) I found that Lunar was an ancestor of Sorceror Linux, a source-based distro.

Some of you might know that my history with source-based distributions is a bit spotty. You would then understand why this news made me hesitant. The code name of this release, "Moose Drool", probably didn't help either.

By the way, I think it worthy of noting up front that this distribution took a lot of work, so strap in. It's going to be a long rant.

Install:

The ISO file weighs in at about 381MB, so it definitely falls into the lightweight category, at first. However all that the disc installs is the basic system, after which you add on each program you want individually.

The install is ncurses text based. You're given the option to review video modes, but the options presented (0F00 through 0F07) didn't really mean much to me. It might as well have been in Klingon.

There's another list to the right with columns and rows, which I suppose would help you if you were an old IBM terminal user.

I am not, so I ended up just going with whatever was the default, which took me to a window that offered introductory documentation. This gave me a bit more illuminating view on the distro.

The default keyboard map on the keymap selection screen is ANSI-dvorak. I found that to be an odd choice, considering most of the world is familiar with some derivative of QWERTY or AZERTY.

My only exposure to Dvorak was from overzealous dweebs in college who tried to convince me it would bring me to enlightenment. I passed and learned emacs instead.

I was then given several steps to follow, including partitioning my drive with cfdisk, choosing what formats I wanted the partitions to use (ext3 and swap) and then chose the "Install Lunar" option.

This formatted my paritions, created a swap file, and began the install of the basic "bootstrap" system. Not surprisingly, this didn't take very long.

I was then asked to install a bootloader. I chose GRUB for familiarity's sake. Next I was asked whether I wanted to compile a kernel or use one that was precompiled on the disc.

Considering the amount of time I expected to spend compiling *other* things (such as X windows) I opted for the canned kernel 2.6.20.

Next I was asked to set the root password and create a regular user account. Here's where I hit my first snag.

I gave the username I wanted and I was presented with a list of available groups for that user. I chose "users" as the default group. The number for that group was 100.

The installer asked me if I wanted to execute the "groupadd 100" command. I said yes and got a "100 is not a valid group name" error.

With no special user interaction, simply choosing menu options, I caused the installer to error. That's not a good sign.

Even stranger, when I exited out of the error prompt, all was well. My user had indeed been created with the proper default group. Odd, considering I had just been told the group didn't exist.

I then went through a set of menus to add, configure, and turn on my network device. This probably could have been simplified, but with a distribution of this type one has to expect very little automation.

The installer informed me I was done. I must say, after the arduous task of setting up something like Gentoo, Lunar had thus far proven to be much less work. Unfortunately the frustration was just postponed, as I found out later.

Upon reboot I was brought to a bash prompt. Following the directions on the wiki site, I first ran a "lunar update". This did exactly what I expected it to. Once it had downloaded everything it prompted me probably two dozen times to enable this or that service, which got annoying after a while.

For someone who wants fine-grain control over their system this would be a plus. I ended up just hitting ENTER over and over and using the defaults. Once it was done asking questions, it took off and started compiling things. This took the better part of an hour and a half.

The first thing I tried to install was the blackbox window manager. I imagined this would pick up X Windows along with it. I was wrong. I then decided to try installing X.org by itself. No go. At this point I consulted the wiki.

Apparently I was spelling XOrg wrong. Fixed. This is something that would have been taken care of by Gentoo's portage system.

Compiling Xorg took pretty much the rest of the evening. At one point the downloads seemed to freeze. I saw no activity for roughly 10 minutes either from my network card or the CPU.

I rebooted and tried again. It hung again. I chalked it up to my internet connection at the time and waited until I could connect somewhere else.

This didn't help either. Just to build my confidence in their installer a bit I installed a few small things (the nano editor for instance). It installed fine, which told me the problem may not have been *completely* the fault of the install framework.

Finally, I got the download to work but after grinding away for half an hour the install for XOrg errored out. By this time I was so sick of looking at this distribution that I declared it done and stopped.

Software Selection:

Not much is installed by default. It pretty much assumes you're going to install what you want after the basic system is set up. This would be fine and dandy if the install framework functioned properly.

With 2 days worth of work I ended up with a fast booting command-line Linux. That's it. To say that I was unhappy with the result would be about like saying Jack Thompson is "mildly annoying" to the world of videogames.

Who's it best for?

It should go without saying that Lunar is not a distribution for those unfamiliar with Linux or unwilling to spend massive amounts of time waiting for things to compile.

Comparisons to Gentoo are inevitable, and when it comes to relatively easy initial setup, I'd give Lunar the nod over Gentoo any day.

It's much faster for me to whiz through 10 or 15 menus than swap between a virtual console and a command line carefully entering one archaic command after another and hoping I don't miss something.

The flip side of that is that while going through a Gentoo installation will teach you an awful lot about Linux internals, the same is not so true for Lunar. There is very little low-level interaction other than partitioning and setting your compile parameters (the latter is optional).

The Lunar installation system doesn't seem as sophisticated as Gentoo's portage, particularly in the realm of dependency resolution. So although you save time installing the base system you're going to have to do some extra grunt work getting everything else set up. Pick your poison there.

There is also, of course, the little point about packages not installing properly, which is something I've not run into in Gentoo. Generally speaking, once you get it set up portage does a nice job.

A major downside I see to Lunar is its relative obscurity compared to Gentoo. I suppose if you're looking to build your own system then a large support community might not be your biggest concern, but when something does go wrong, Gentoo has the advantage in sheer numbers.

Personally, I have better things to do with my time than use either Gentoo or Lunar Linux. The sheer amount of effort it takes to get them up trumps any marginal speed advantage over something like Ubuntu or SuSE.

Someone will like Lunar, I'm sure. Just as there are masochists out there who flail themselves with the latest CD sets from Pope Volkerding, there will be those who swear by do-it-yourselfers like this distribution.

More power to you, if that's your thing. I'd rather be catching up on my Wii.