Linked by Barry Smith on Mon 8th Dec 2003 19:40 UTC
This is the third 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, the second one focused on Libranet, and this article covers a recently released distro called MEPIS.
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By Jason wrote:
>Also, I do not believe you can use two drives (I like /home >on a separate drive).
>If any of the above is untrue please enlighten me.
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I used the last release of Mepis for a while (2003-08-xx), I think. While it's true that the installer did not give me even the ability to create a seperate /boot, never mind adding a second drive, it's not that hard to do manually. Basically, you need to edit /etc/fstab (as root) and add the new hard drive or partition. To do this you have to specify the device (eg /dev/hdb1 for the first partition on the second IDE drive), the type of filesystem (Reiserfs in my case), the mount point (/multimedia for me), and some other stuff that you can figure out from looking at your existing /etc/fstab or by running man fstab.
While I didn't move my /home to a second drive, I'm fairly sure you could also do this manually: first create the new /home partition on the second hard drive, then initialize it with your file system of choice (mke2fs, mke2fs -j, mkreiserfs, mkxfs, etc), then mount it as root ("mkdir /newhome", "mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /newhome") and copy the entire contents of your /home over - rsync is a good way to do this - making sure to preserve file ownership and permissions with the appropriate option (-a for rsync). Then edit /etc/fstab to make the new partition your /home, unmount /newhome, reboot, and you should be in business.
I used this approach to add a large second hard drive that contains most of my music (ripped from my CD's using the awesome FLAC lossless codec).
I too have been very impressed by the level of quality Mepis shows this early in it's development, but experienced a few niggles that have kept me from keeping it on my system. In particular the version of Mepis I used had trouble using a third very large (200 Gig) hard drive mounted via a Promise PCI IDE controller card, while Knoppix 3.3 had no troubles with the exact same hardware. Also on my system (Athlon XP 2400+, 512 MB DDR 2100, ECS motherboard) Mepis ran incredibly slowly after being installed to the hard drive - at about the same speed as Knoppix running from the CD! A third problem was that Mplayer could not play DVD's without incredible numbers of missed frames under Mepis (problems with poor Soundblaster Live card support, I think), while Mandrake 9.1 had absolutely no trouble playing DVD's with the same hardware.
It is possible some of these issues have been fixed with the new release of Mepis, and I intend to give it a try. And whether or not these problems have gone away yet, I would like to congratulate Warren on probably the most impressive start to a new Linux distro that I've ever seen! If Warren doesn't suffer burnout before he gets the community help he needs, this promises to be a fine distro one day. My best wishes to the project.
-gnubuddy