A fan

[TRN]

I'm a fan of Libranet. Their latest release is 2.7. It installs GNOME 2 and KDE 3. That may not seem fantastic unless you are thinking about installing and using Debian. Libranet has a slick installation which then allows the user to change the sources.list to sid. The machine can then be updated to some of the latest releases of software easily.

[goneaway]

is indeed nice. All of my other machines are Debian but I used the downloadable Libranet for a laptop install and I was really impressed with it. Granted I don't think that the stock Debian installer deserves as much bad press as it's been getting lately but the Libranet installer is a nice refinement of the Debian process and seems to be a little PCMCIA friendlier.

As a somewhat longtime Debian user I didn't find the admin tools as handy as others might but I did try them out and they seemed very robust. I blew out much of what the task selection installed but I was impressed by the extra stuff included (like Opera). I also switched the fs from ReiserFS to Ext3. I also like the fact that grub is the default boot loader since if it's configured properly the first time around a new user could avoid much potential pain (I'm thinking of kernel image upgrades and such) in the future.

How do dist-upgrades go?

I've changed the sources.list on many Libranet installs and then upgraded things to sid. In fact, this machine I'm using right now is Libranet 2.7 updated to sid. I love to use synaptic to just explore what new .deb packages are available.

[goneaway]

at least in unstable can always be found here: http://auric.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs.html which gives you the whole list. I know what you mean about rooting around for new packages being a total blast sometimes. I was astonished the day that I saw limewire there.