Lunar Linux Review

Lunar Linux is a “source-based” Linux distribution which was forked from Sorcerer. It offers a unique source-based package management system which offers fine-grained control for what software one wants to install, with what optimisations one wants to use to compile it, and a choice of dependencies for the package. In this review I’ll be discussing various topics, from ease of use, the installer layout, and what to expect. I will be using the 64-bit version in this review. Now, on to the review.

At the bootloader, I was presented with a relatively run of the mill introduction, with some selectable documentation and boot options. For the most part, these boot options can be ignored, and you can safely proceed with pressing “enter”, though some of these options may confuse and overwhelm inexperienced users.

After booting, you’ll find a pretty typical TUI installer typical of metadistributions, and distributions without the X windowing system, and should look familiar to anyone who’s used Debian’s installer or FreeBSD’s sysinstall. The installer interface is relatively easy, though not exactly straightforward. It’s rather dodgy and inconsistent, but very interactive, providing documentation, tips, and an abundance of options along the way. Among those options are nice touches, like being able to select a file system (instead of being forced to use Ext3/Ext4),  the ability to choose your favourite text editor, and the ability to select from a handful of kernels, including one optimised for server use. Later in the installer is a real deal-breaker for novice users- it requires you to partition the disks with cfdisk or fdisk- there are no automatic defaults. In the end, the system installer can do its job, but is likely to be intimidating to users who are new to Linux.

After booting my freshly installed system, I was presented with helpful sections of text that point to man pages for getting started. These man pages are not what someone would typically think of when they think of a man page, they are in fact very helpful, readable, and understandable. Despite being a minimalist, do-it-yourself, metadistribution, Lunar is anything but laissez-faire, and includes helpful documentation and verbosity throughout much of the system. This verbosity and interactivity is further carried out through the system’s package management.

Lunar Linux, as mentioned before, is a source-based Linux distribution. All that this really means is that instead of downloading and installing a precompiled binary package, the system’s package manager downloads the source code and compiles it into the binaries locally through various scripts. There are both advantages and disadvantages to this. The disadvantage is immediately obvious- downloading source code and compiling a binary is a very time-consuming and resource intensive process as opposed to simply downloading a precompiled binary, and can make updating complicated and slow. The advantage to this is that the packages can be optimised for the system they are being installed on, rather than the generic binaries that are distributed in binary packages. Often times, the performance of locally compiled binaries is negligible, or even worse than those of precompiled ones. Lunar Linux offers a way to automate the download and build process through its unique package management suite called lunar. Lunar, along with most of the system, is very verbose, and offers many options. Typing lunar will bring you to a TUI that allows for easy configuration of many package managing tasks, including mirror selection, dependency fixing, accepted/rejected licenses, architecture optimisations, and much more.  To install a package with lunar, one would simply type “lunar install pkg_name”. The installation process will walk you through and have you manually choose which dependencies you want to install for that package, and allows you to choose options for those dependencies. This allows you to get everything you want, and nothing more, the problem is is that you have to know whether or not you need it. Overall, the installation scripts work as you’d expect them to. The lunar command also offers various other options, including updating, removing, reinstalling, etc.

To summarise, Lunar Linux is a great system, and an easy to use source-based Linux distribution that doesn’t require as much know-how as is the case with CRUX or Gentoo. It’s a little rough around the edges, and it certainly has that “hacked together feel”, but the verbosity and on-board documentation certainly compensate for this. I’ll continue to run it for a while to see exactly how robust the package management is, and I might return with another review of it in the future.

Cheers!