Mepis is making the transition to a full-fledged easy-to-use desktop and general-purpose Linux distribution. The following is both an overview and review of this excellent new Linux distribution.
SimplyMepis 2004.01 Review
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 don’t know if Ubuntu is good, and personally I couldn’t care less because I’m happy with my Arch. Anyway, I think that Ubuntu will soon become the most hated distribution if its marketing department will continue with this annoying spam…
See, this right off the bat makes me not interested. When I first tried knoppix it was a nightmare trying to convert it to sid/unstable. I want a debian distro with no mixed sources. So I went with morphix. It’s not updated as often, but it’s been around before mepis and gives me what I want.
These live debian distros that are mxied sources feel like they are built on a house of cards. Try and upgrade them and the problems arise.
Oh and I have tried mepis, last year actually and I am in the habit of manually writing lilo from my other distro so I told mepis during the install to NOT write lilo. What happened, next reboot I got all 999’s from lilo. So not only did it not do as I indicated, it mucked up my mbr. I’ve been through that a few times so not a big deal for me, but I could see that being alarming to other users.
With that and problems bringing it up to date with all sid pkgs, and some weird slow down issues I couldn’t figure out, I wiped the partition and gave up on mepis.
Have things changed with this distro?
Mepis isn’t the cleanest Linux distribution, the most well thought out, etc., but it does do all the low-level dirty work that I can’t do. I can’t compile my touchpad’s driver into the kernel. I can’t get the kernel to work with my notebook’s ACPI if it doesn’t (only Mepis’ and Fedora’s kernel works with my notebook’s ACPI power management – likely due to the buggy nature of ACPI’s implementation by most companies). I can’t create a package management system and repositories of software. I can install any software I want through apt. That’s easy. I can get rid of the desktop icons I don’t want there. I can set up a different desktop environment (I’m just not a KDE fan). Mepis does what I can’t do and that makes it the Linux distro for me.
here’s a quote:
SimplyMepis 2004.01 is very fast for a Linux distribution. I run it comfortably on several PII400MHz machines with 128MB of RAM. KDE 3.2 is by no means a speed daemon with only 128MB of RAM, but it is quite usable. I also find the inclusion of the 2.4 kernel to be a boon on low-end hardware. Where Fedora Core 2 would thrash constantly on machines with less that 256MB of RAM, Mepis seems to run just fine. As the most obvious difference is the kernel, I assume that 2.4’s less aggressive scheduler lends itself to lower performance machines.
Has anyone else found this to be true? I have been sticking with 2.4 as when I use 2.6 I can’t play a game (enemy territory). With 2.4 I can play as long as I want, but with 2.6 the map times take longer and longer to load until I’m kicked from servers. Otherwise I’d prefer to stay with 2.4
Is there an article or discussion about areas,circumstances where 2.4 still beats 2.6? And maybe anyway of dealing with it?
>>but with 2.6 the map times take longer and longer to load until I’m kicked from servers
It might just be my imagination but the map loading in UT2004 *seems* to be faster in 2.6.X
Also when I was running 2.4.X (2.4.24 to be more precise), my game would constanly crash every 3/4hr – 1hr.
Why is it, no matter what distro the review is about, 90+ percent of all comments are “my distro beats your distro”. I don’t care what distro is your personal choice of “best”. Lets talk about the reviewed distro.
Keep it to “this worked” and “this didn’t work” type stuff, and if you haven’t installed the current distro being reviewed, and you’re not posting a question, why do you feel the urge to comment???
Comparisons are ok (within limits), but lets keep them relevant to the article.
Finally, if you’re such a good technical writer, prove it by writing your own article instead of nit-picking the person who actually took the time to do so.
Tired of the fluff and bickering.
I couldn’t agree with you more, VonSkippy. I enjoy reading the plethora of Linux distro reviews, and invariably, the comments include “my distro is better than your distro” garbage. Some (probably a small minority) Linux enthusiastic can be quite childish.
Anyway, I have Mepis myself, both the 2003.10.2 version installed on my eMachines (dual booting with WinXP) and 2004 rc5 (that I like to run from CD), along with Mandrake on my Thinkpad (my other favorite distro). And I love Mepis. It’s hardware detection and auto configuration is phenomenal, as it’s brain dead easy hd installation. Finally, apt with KPackage is awesome.
I highly recommend Mepis to any newbie, as well as any Linux enthusiast who wants an easy Debian install.
Oh, and I’ve ordered Ubuntu CD’s (which are supposed to come when the first edition is finalized – late Oct), and I’m eagerly anticipating playing with this highly touted distro.
However, as it stands now, Mepis rocks!
“…With that and problems bringing it up to date with all sid pkgs, and some weird slow down issues I couldn’t figure out, I wiped the partition and gave up on mepis.
Have things changed with this distro?”
Yes, things have changed quite a bit. For starters, they use grub, so no more lilo. 😉 As for the mix of Sid and Sarge, Mepis is pinned to sarge but they have their own pool first. This pool is in the process of expanding to cover all packages included by default. It offers Mepis users a coherent controlled upgrade path. Another big advantage here is that Sarge is on the verge of release, so the packages are actually quite stable now.
This is a big change to Mepis, until late RCs it was still pinned to Sid. I agree that this caused too many problems. In fact, I was taking snapshots of the debian pool just to ensure that my users had clean packages to work from.
This is the joy of distros. Every one can find their perfect match. Be you engineer or be your business player theres a distro for you. So to each their own!
I’m glade to see MEPIS is shaving off the performance edge. I love Fedora’s slickness but man is it horrible on low end machines.
Last fall I loaded 2003.10. It was dead slow. Couldn’t figure it out. 2 weeks ago I downloaded 2004.01 then 2004.02 which I have running on 2 of my machines, AMD P2000 Athlon and a P3
500mghz. It runs beaautiful on both using 2.6.7. My only gripe is the way you tweak things. Control functions are split between several menu trees. Like to see then as in Xandros. BTW Xandros 2.0 upgraded to 2.4.24 is dog slow on the 500 P3. I find myself using Mepis more than any other distro I have installed. I made my contribution to the cause, don’t forget to that BTW.
I used MEPIS for a few weeks. It does work well but there is a very good reason they had to start a MEPIS beautification project. This distro is aimed for new users and I think eye candy is as important for a first good impression as the stuff a new user doesnt necessarily notice.
…too bad I don’t like KDE very much. But the principles are great (KISS). Looks like an ideal system for an everyday user. The utilities look pretty straightforward and easy to use and it sounds like it is a dream when it comes to detecting hardware and initial configuration!
Kudos to the Mepis developers.
Mike
While I actually really like MEPIS, being as that it’s one of the few Linux distributions that gets along nicely with my machine, one of my primary gripes with it is its release schedule. Or, more aptly, the lack of one.
I downloaded SimplyMEPIS 2004.01 overnight on my “slow” DSL connection, and burned it the next day to use as a live CD. The following day, SimplyMEPIS 2004.02 was released. I waited a week to download SimplyMEPIS 2004.02 overnight, and burned it the next day. Two days later, SimplyMEPIS 2004.03 is “unofficially” released. Sigh.
That’s two ights of downloading wasted, along with two CDs. I’m debating whether or not to download SimplyMEPIS 2004.03 when it is officially released, as knowing my luck, SimplyMEPIS 2004.04 will be released within a day or two afterwards.
It wouldn’t be so bad if there was some kind of schedule or forewarned of an upcoming release. That way I can just wait until the last SimplyMEPIS 2004 release before downloading & burning it. But the way it is now, I seem to be taking a chance with each new release, and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s worth it.
I’ve been using for over 4 months now, it is generally good (managed to replace Mandrake on my drive) but it has some glitches I wanted to point out here:
It just wiped off my D and E partitions. After installation I rebooted to windows and imagine my face when I saw my partitions gone. Luckily I had all the backups. I am still looking for a reason why this happened.
Default look and feel is just bad. Also font rendering is worse than Mandrake’s. Any text bigger that 8 points has rendering problems.
Apt-get upgrade really breaks your system. I managed to brake power management (system won’t shut down), Nvidia modules for 2.6 kernel (2.4 works fine), sound system and maybe other things I am not yet aware of. Don’t even try upgrading if you don’t need that. I had to, because I wanted Gnome
Maybe this is not the fault of Mepis, but Debian in general, but all the rumours about package amount on Debian are just not true. I am still waiting for evolution 2.0 and aspell 0.6 to appear on repositories. Gnome 2.8 would be great too.
I am currently waiting for finar Ubuntu release, as it seems it will replace my Mepis.
Thanks…
ifplugd probably isn’t used everywhere as it can cause quite a few problems with cards that don’t support it. Mandrake uses it by default, but to be honest, it does cause some problems – one of the first things we do when someone comes to #mandrake looking for help with networking is to turn ifplugd off, and quite a few times that solves the problem by itself…
I downloaded SimplyMEPIS 2004.01 overnight on my “slow” DSL connection, and burned it the next day to use as a live CD. The following day, SimplyMEPIS 2004.02 was released. I waited a week to download SimplyMEPIS 2004.02 overnight, and burned it the next day. Two days later, SimplyMEPIS 2004.03 is “unofficially” released. Sigh.
Is there something wrong with the version you downloaded? If not, then the only problem is in your mind because you seem have the compulsion that you can only use the LATEST AND THE GREATEST version of software.
Wise up, my friend. Don’t try to fix something that ain’t broken. You should only do upgrades when there’s some SIGNIFICANT advantage added — not just because some software has been upgraded from version 2004.02 to 2004.03 or 2004.04. :-p
Don’t worry about not having the latest release. SimplyMepis 2004 is the version number. The changes between minor revisions are miniscule. 01 to 02 was opening of a port on the firewall and a few minor startup script changes, 02 to 03 fixes a couple of minor problems with the installer. Warren makes small tweaks and then releases a new ISO. If 01 or 02 works for you, doing an apt-get upgrade will do everything you need. Really, the new ISOs are just a convenience for someone who is installing Mepis on a lot of machines.
I tried Ubuntu on my iBook and a PC. It’s pretty nice, but it doesn’t do the nifty hardware detection/fstab generation that Mepis does. Not to mention the fact that Mepis makes a great LiveCD with a nice graphical installer, where Ubuntu is a more traditional Debian distribution.
Also, Mepis isn’t as strict about Free software. I understand and respect that this may rub some people the wrong way, but the people that I have set Mepis up for generally just like that they can view QuickTime, Flash and RealPlayer files. Oh, and having a good JRE out of the box is a nice touch too. These are things that are missing in the preview release of Ubuntu. Hopefully some of these issues will be worked out by Ubuntu’s final release.
Oh, and while we’re on the topic of Ubuntu PPC, Ubuntu kills my system (iBook G3700) when it goes into sleep mode, has this happened to anyone else?
I have been using Mepis for quite some time and have been very pleased with it. I stil feel that this is a young distro and is working a few things out, but it is exciting to see a distro with so much potential and watch it grow. Warren has done an excellent job and new developers are jumping on board all the time to help. This distro will only get better in the future.
btw, Warren will be speaking at our Linux Users Group meeting in West Virginia this week if anyone in the area is interested. More information at http://www.movlug.com shameless plug