It covers everything on how to make a "perfect desktop". How to play various streaming media, do your own LAN streaming, play css DVDs, VoIP, gnomemeeting, browsers, email clients, office and productivity, DOS and Windows program usage packages, window managers, and why each implementation is worth using and easy to set up. The sum of the parts is amazing and the author has done a good job of describing things in the simplest terms.
The one thing I did not like is that the author recommends apt-get over synaptic. I do that and use dselect with an earlier version of Mepis. While it brings bleeding edge software to you, it does so at a cost of hundreds of megs of downloading and perhaps hours of installing that eliminates the advantage of a 10 to 15 minute single CD install. Worse, applications can sometimes dissapear if they are being worked on. This would freak a newbie out unless Simply Mepis has vastly improved apt-get. The result is basically experimental Debian, which is fun and works but hard to maintain. Ed Richards has been using Synaptic and demonstrated it to me at the last SIG. It somehow manages to pull only packages that are needed without doing a complete update and the system remains Mepis.
