Greetings, all...
As some of you might know, I routinely switch distributions,
sometimes to try out new features, but mostly so that I can increase my
base of knowledge about what is out there in the Linux world. So far,
the path has taken me from Red Hat, to Mandrake, to Fedora Core, to
Mandrake, to Fedora Core 2, to Mandrake (hehe), to Gentoo, to Mandrake,
to a full Stage 1 NPTL-enabled Gentoo (not an easy task), to Mandrake,
to Fedora Core 3, back to Mandrake, to Xandros, to pure Debian (because
of deficiencies in Xandros), and then finally landing at Mepis (to have
a coherent Debian package).
I chose ProMepis Beta 03 (I call it that, because that is what the
distro was labelled as, but what I had actually done was downloaded the
latest possible release ISO).
In brief, I was totally impressed; never before had I seen a
distribution as complete, as coherent, as the one I saw in Mepis. If
Windows is going to have a competitor, it will be in Mepis; Mepis has
all the power of the Debian distribution behind it, with clear,
functional package managers (it comes with KPackage, but Synaptic is
very easy to get). It is based around the "apt" utility, which if you
haven't used, is pure heaven for installing Linux applications.
Mepis properly identified all of my hardware, and set up my network
perfectly on the first try - it even identified my sound correctly, a
feat which Xandros failed to do. Best of all, it set up my X windows
perfectly - and even included the Nvidia driver (although this was a
check-box away, this is a different story).
The installation came in the form of a "Live CD"; booting into Mepis
was nice, and then you had a small wizard to click that would install it
to your hard-drive. The best part was that you could continue to play
while it did it. This beats sitting and watching your computer go
through the install, with you acting as patient, but bored, babysitter.
The Upside - everything is there. It comes with Firefox, and all
the extensions and file associations for 99% of what you do on the web
today is pre-configured for you. Having experienced in every
distribution a decided lack of preconfigured web browsers, this was
heaven for me. Video, sound, movies, flash, java...it was all there. I
had to do nothing to make it all work.
I can't overstate the fact that everything I needed for 99% of what
I do with the computer was there.
The Downside - There were only two, and only one was important.
The minor one was the Mepis seems to be KDE-centric. I haven't
tried a Gnome install, and the option for one wasn't readily apparent
(in fact, I am not sure one existed). This, in itself, is not a major
issue; I have come to like KDE, in spite of heavy Gnome-leanings for
quite a while now. There are some apps (Korganizer being the most
important one) that I have come to rely on. But I fear that all of the
completeness of the KDE install wouldn't have been there for the Gnome
variant.
The second one was almost mission critical - and still remains
unsolved. Mepis comes with the 6629 Nvidia drivers, and the 2.6.7
kernel. This is nice, but the 6629 drivers are bugged with my GeForce 4
MX 440; it will show the splash screen, but everything else gets drawn
on top of it, and it doesn't clear the screen. I don't know why, but
this problem has haunted me over the last 5 installations of various
distributions. I have been patiently waiting for a fix, and until
Mepis, I always installed the 6111 drivers and everything was fine.
So, I thought I had a solution - install the 6111 drivers on Mepis,
and just wait for a new set of drivers from Nvidia to fix the problem
(which is a known problem that thousands of Linux users have). There
was only one problem, and that is that the 6111 drivers won't compile on
the 2.6 kernels. I found a patched version, and tried it, but it
promptly crashed at the famous Nvidia logo splash. I haven't dug
further than that - I'm pretty sure the problem is not with my
installation, but with the driver itself.
The upshot is that Mepis is perfect, except for the fact that I'm in
a dependency loop waiting for Nvidia to give Linux some proper vendor
support. But that's not a new condition for Linux, and is certainly no
mar on Mepis.
David Jackson
