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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I have been running Mepis for a couple months on a laptop and pc, so I guess I'll share my thoughts. Installation, hardware detection, and auto-configuration were all excellent (I think it uses the Knoppix script for this).
The install stuff is important to me, but not as much as having a distro that's upgradeable and stable over the long term. This is one area of Mepis that I feel needs change, which I have posted on their forum before with no real feedback. The issue at hand is they use a mix of stable, testing and unstable. Anybody that has used Debian before knows that you are asking for trouble when doing an apt-get update/upgrade/dist-upgrade. The first few times I did this I ended up with broken packages all over the place, it was a nightmare to fix and got worse as new packages were introduced (primarily from unstable).
This time I'm using priority pinning (which is not used by default), as in a /etc/apt/preferences file to manage this a bit better, and changed the apt.conf file to read “testing” instead of “unstable”.
Here is what my preferences file looks like:
Explanation: see http://www.argon.org/~roderick/apt-pinning.html
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing
Pin-Priority: 900
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 50
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: 30
This way, when I run apt, it will only pull packages from testing to upgrade, and over time it will turn into a pure testing distro without busting up my current unstable and stable packages. I'm an intermediate/advanced GNU/Linux user, so I have no issue digging in config files, but the average user would have problems with this I think. I started using pinning on my Morphix (Gnome, KDE, and Lite) box, which uses testing and unstable and it has worked excellent over the last several months; not one broken package.
Other than that, I would highly recommend this distro, as it has excellent hardware detection and configuration, includes a well though out group of apps, and little things like flash and JRE out of the box (lots other little things like this). FYI, I've ran FreeBSD, Debian, Morphix, Knoppix, Gentoo, Redhat, Mandrake, SuSe, Damn Small Linux, Ark and others I can't remember on a variety of pcs and laptops, and none has topped Mepis for overall out of the box excellence. Give it a try.