This is a second article in a series of reviews from newsforge comparing MEPIS and Lindows.
Spawn of Debian Face Off: MEPIS Linux
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I installed Mepis last Saturday. Overall I would say its a good distro. The default setup is very nice. Most of my hardware got set up automatically. Good inclusion of apps. They maintain at least application level compatibility with debian. This was good in that apt-get worked right off the bat, but bad in that I had to jump through some hoops to figure out how to get things like transcode, xvid, and other stuff that the official debian repositories don’t provide. My biggest qualm is that I need to do a kernel recompile to provide modules for some hardware I have, but there aren’t any sources that I have found, official or otherwise.
Support forums are okay, but not the best I have seen.
3D acceleration. When I type glxgears, it just spits out errors. I replaced the XF86Config file but that didnt work
Oh well.
Same here. its why I want to recompile the kernel. I need the intel-agp module, but it isn’t in the default kernel.
Can’t you just download the vanilla kernel from kernel.org? I don’t think MEPIS uses any proprietary patches or anything.
And, I agree with the forums and have suggested they use a diffferent format. No response to that yet, though. Many others seem to be disatisfied with how they work (mechanically speaking). So, I expect Warren will respond to it when there is time. phpbb works well and easy to implement. If I can do it, I know he can.
apt-get install kernel-source
or
apt-cache search kernel-source
to get a list of available sources
I believe that there are some patches applied to it. If not then I am game, but the only distro I have seen that survives a kernel recompile is gentoo. The rest give all sorts of errors, mainly related to naming conventions. I figure there have to be at least a few changes to the kernel to get the autodetection to work as well as it does.
For some reason, several of my machines which are on completely different networks can’t resolve http://www.Mepis.org or Mepis.org.
So, I’d be grateful if somebody has the answers to a couple of questions:
1. Is the system administration designed by Mepis or is it just the kde system administration stuff. What can be administered via a GUI on the Mepis distribution.
2. How is multimedia support out of the box?
* Is there mp3 support?
* Is there dvd playback support
* Which players are installed by default.
3. I see Mepis uses KDE as the desktop. Are the gnome libraries included and are apps such as evolution and gaim included.
Thanks in advance.
You can recompile the kernel and there are a couple of successful examples on the MEPIS Forums. I agree with you that the structure provided by Drupal is not the most easily accessible and I believe that MEPIS will be moving its forums and support to a more easily readable and accessible formats.
I’ve used MEPIS for a while now and I think it has an excellent chance of being a Linux Desktop champ!
but the only distro I have seen that survives a kernel recompile is gentoo.
I’ve done this on various mandrakes and it survives just fine.
“I’d be grateful if somebody has the answers to a couple of questions:
1. Is the system administration designed by Mepis or is it just the kde system administration stuff. What can be administered via a GUI on the Mepis distribution.
2. How is multimedia support out of the box?
* Is there mp3 support?
* Is there dvd playback support
* Which players are installed by default.
3. I see Mepis uses KDE as the desktop. Are the gnome libraries included and are apps such as evolution and gaim included.”
1. Both
2. Good
* yes
* yes
* several of popular, xine etc
3.yes
I really like Mepis. It just works. I am happy to say that the $10 support option really works as well. Warren never sleeps.
HOWEVER: There is some issue with radeon vid cards. Its obvious that Mepis is Warrens computer installed on YOUR computer. He uses Nvidia, so you are better off if you happen to be using Nvidia too.
Aside from that however, I do think this is a distro worth trying out. I am using it on my laptop and my home computer. Its fast and snappy for me, and I have been able to add what I want.