Warren wasn't BS*ing, Mepis will now come preinstalled

Post by **Patrick** » Fri May 06, 2005 8:42 am

Warreen Woodford wasn't bullshiting when he told us that Mepis would show up preinstalled on machines. He's apparently made a couple of deals with some HW vendors:
http://www.mepis.org/

One of the distributers listed was Easton Electronics. Anyone familiar with this place? Now all we need are laptops with Mepis pre-installed. One of the announcements says PPC and AMD64 versions will be developed in the future. I gotta try Mepis out myself this weekend. Time to wipe out the drive with Linspire (review copy) on it and give Mepis a whirl.

Post by **Patrick** » Mon May 09, 2005 8:44 am

I installed Mepis 3.3 on a spare drive this past weekend. My impressions:
Positives:
- very well done distro, considering it's basically a 1 man operation
- super easy install, the most complete set of apps on any distro I've ever installed
- very complete set of codecs for any distro
- java pre-installed
- It's better than Ubuntu!

Negatives:
So far only x86 is supported
firewire not functioning out of the box (kernel recompile required)

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Mon May 09, 2005 1:33 pm

Has the KDE package management improved at all?

Last time I tried Mepis (early 2004), updating KDE files (via Synaptic) resulted in a broken desktop manager.

Also, I had to drop down to XFCE if I wanted to play a 3D accelerated game, like RTCW. Now, that could have been a KDE issue, not necessarily Mepis.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue May 10, 2005 8:51 am

Judland wrote:Has the KDE package management improved at all?
Last time I tried Mepis (early 2004), updating KDE files (via Synaptic) resulted in a broken desktop manager.

I haven't had a chance to update KDE yet. I'll let you know when it happens. I'm going to do a dist-upgrade once 3.3.1 comes out. Personally I like the command like for my apt-get fun.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue May 10, 2005 11:50 am

Article from EWeek:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1814431,00.asp

Post by **Patrick** » Thu May 12, 2005 12:53 pm

I just found this negative stuff:
http://linux-blog.org/index.php?/archiv ... -Site.html

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Thu May 12, 2005 1:25 pm

There's three reasons I moved away from using Mepis.

One: KDE was a bit buggy and when I did a dist-upgrade from the Mepis repositories, KDE broke.

Two: KDE also seemed slow. A 3D accelerated game, like RTCW, just didn't perform all that well, and MP3 playback was "choppy" every once in a while.

Three: About a year ago I e-mailed Warren with a question about distributing Mepis CDs. I got a reply that just didn't sit well with me. For being regarded as free and open, I had concerns on the direction Mepis seemed to be taking (in my own opinion).

Fortunately, the distro I use now has none of the performance issues, the dist-upgrade works every time, and it's still run by one guy, but his views on free and open meet my expectations.

I don't know.... perhaps I have a chip on my shoulder, but "corporate" funded (or those organizations with corporate dreams) Linux distros don't make me feel very comfortable.

Post by **Patrick** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 7:04 am

Sounds like this is finally a reality:
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.p ... 3123927205

It took slightly over a year to happen since I first reported this.