Linked by Barry Smith on Mon 1st Dec 2003 18:34 UTC
This is the second in my series of reviews for debian-based commercial distros that might be appropriate for SOHO use. The first article covered my exploration of Lindows, and this one is focused on Libranet. Before I get started with Libranet I want to clarify a couple of points. 
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>... Mepis is one distro I am keeping an eye on, and can't wait for this series to review it
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I've been running the last release of Mepis (2003.8 ??) for a couple of months now, on an Athlon XP 2400+ system with an ECS motherboard,512 MB DDR, an AGP GeForce Vanta video card, and the usual IDE hard drives and optical drives.
My impressions of Mepis are mixed. On the plus side, the install was easy, and resulted quickly in a working system. I found no broken programs, which is quite a testament considering that this is a brand new distro. Adding Debian apt-get sources and updating various programs to debian unstable also went smoothly. I was able to add programs like flac (lossless alternative to things like mp3 and ogg), quicktime decoders for Mplayer, etc, without any fuss.
On the minus side, Mepis seems awfully slow on my system - it feels rather a lot like Knoppix running from the CD, which is rather surprising since it's running from an ATA 133 IDE hard drive. Also I recently added a big (200 GB) WD hard drive with its Promise PCI controller card to my system, and while Mepis finds the Promise controller and big drive, it seems to be unable to create or read a partition table on it. I was able to mount and partition the drive (two Reiserfs partitions) using Knoppix 3.3, but on reboot Mepis is still unhappy with the big drive and won't read or write to it. This is true even if I make both partitions smaller than the 137 GB limit I'm told some BIOS'es have. (Note: I'm a long, long way from Linux guru status, so I have no idea why Mepis has more trouble with the big drive than Knoppix 3.3).
I would say Mepis is definitely off to a great start for a new distro, and I may try the newest release when I get the chance.
Meantime, frustrated by the slowness of my old Mepis install, I just wiped it today and started to install Gentoo instead. I guess I'll know in a couple of weeks whether I like Gentoo, assuming I get through the entire install/compile process. I'm building from a stage-1 tarball, so there will be many days worth of compilation ahead of me...