As some of you may know, I’m a distribution junkie, I love to get my hands on the newest releases and put them through a somewhat thorough testing. This time I finally had time to burn Simply Mepis 3.3 and give it a try. The results of this distribution are amazing!
First off, let me tell you this version of Mepis is both a Live CD and a Full Install version of Linux. What makes Live CD’s great is you get to run a full Linux OS off of the CD. Since it’s Linux, not many people have to worry about viruses, trojans, worms, things of that nature. Since this is a Live CD, security is even tighter as nobody can add or remove any part of any program included from the CD to or from the CD. Other than hoping that the creator of any Live-based Linux distribution gives you the program you love to use or need, there’s no way of adding it to the disk unless you either use a CD-RW or have a USB mass storage device to put modules onto and load them up every time you have to restart your computer. Plus, the speed of your Linux Live OS is limited to the speed of your CDROM. It’s not a bad trade-off from a security point of view; you don’t have to overwrite any partition of your hard drive to find out what will or will not work by using Live CD’s.
After I burned Simply Mepis, I put it in the CDROM and it booted up. To my surprise, it not only found my Motorola WN825G wireless PCMCIA card, it also set it up!! This is the first distro of Linux I’ve ever used that has done this. Mandriva found the card, but I had to go into my Windows partition, find the bcmwl5.inf driver to load, manually configure my network settings and then it worked. I was in awe. Then again, I have been so impressed with Debian-based distributions lately, maybe I shouldn’t have been so overwhelmed by how great it worked right from the CD-burner. I was so impressed with Mepis, I installed it over my Mandriva partition on my test computer. It’s safe to say that Mepis will be dual-booting with my Windows XP partition until at least Ubuntu ’’Breezy’’ 5.10 comes out or Mandriva LE 2006 comes out. I didn’t have to shut down my computer to install Mepis to my hard drive, either. All I did was click on an icon on my desktop that says ’’INSTALL ME’’ and you go through a wizard and install it to whichever partition you choose and it’s done in around 20 minutes (at least it was 20 minutes for me using a Pentium Celeron Coppermine 700 Mhz processor with 256 MB RAM and a partition of 4 GB set aside for my Linux / partition).
As I briefly said about hardware detection, this found my wireless PCMCIA network card.. something not so easily done by other Linux distributions. Fedora only found one out of the three network interfaces I had set up on my computer. Mandriva found all 3 of my network interfaces, but only set up my wired ethernet connection. The wireless (wlan0) needed a Windows driver and the modem was detected but also needed a hardware-specific driver to get it properly working. Mepis, I’m sad to say, didn’t find my modem. But this isn’t just a Mepis or Fedora or Mandriva-specific problem, this has been a problem in Linux for a long time. Most vendors out there cater to Windows and write drivers for them because of Windows’ popularity. With the explosion of Linux distributions lately, I think the tide will change for Linux and more vendors will support Linux a lot quicker than they have in the past. The hardware that gives Linux fits, in my experience, are those scanners, printers, modems and wireless cards. Printers and wireless Linux drivers have gotten better in the past 2 years, but modems and scanners are still idle in that department, at least from my experiences. Other than the modem, Mepis found and autodetected the rest of my hardware flawlessly. That’s what an OS should do!
The bottom line is would I recommend Mepis to Linux newbies? Do I think this distribution is a solid choice for any computer user? My answer is an ear-shattering YES. I installed this over Mandriva, a distribution I gave 5 stars in every category for just recently. Mepis, being Debian-based, has easy package management anyone can use from the command line. Just bring up a console, su <enter> type in your password to get to root then type in sudo apt-get update and then apt-get upgrade and you’ll have the newest versions of all the programs you have installed updated. Or you can use the already-included Synaptic. See the pattern here? You have a choice! That’s what open source is all about. I must admit that I am a big Gnome fan but I found myself really taking to the KDE environment lately. I like KDE because it’s easier to configure and set up the way I like it. Gnome is harder to configure the way I want it to. Don’t get me wrong, both KDE and Gnome are great, you can’t go wrong with either one of them. Again, it’s just a matter of choice. Anyone see a pattern here?
In ending, I just want to say this distro is great. Since this is both a Live CD and a full HD install, it’s usefulness is a very welcomed addition to my collection. I can use this CD for anything from using the Live CD for a solid OS, to fixing any problems I might have recovering information from a partition, to installing it on my hard drive to get the full OS and update anything I want and add anything I need. This disk belongs in any computer person’s handbag as a very powerful tool. It’s easy to use and you don’t have to overwrite partitions to get it working to use or try Linux. Everybody wins when using this distribution.