You're not supposed to "lift the hood" on Simply Mepis.  The distro is 
designed, as you noticed, for general Windows users, and has a lot of 
common Unix-isms removed or modified to make it easier for users to feel 
comfortable.
It's modified in a couple of other ways to make it "just work".  This, 
unfortunately, makes it appear a little strange to the experienced Linux 
user when delving beneath the surface presentation.
They designate the RAMDisk as /dev/hda1 in the live CD to make the Live 
CD run more like the same distro when installed (when hda1 would, 
presumably, point to the root partition).
Don't know what the problem with Gftp is...

==Joseph++

P.S. Cox network is experiencing signal strength problems in some areas, 
this is causing lost connections and/or high packet loss at times, 
particularly late night/early morning.  It seems that some portions of 
the HFC network have experienced a 10-15dB drop in signal strength in 
the past couple of weeks, possibly due to water infiltration at key 
branch points.

Victor Odhner wrote:

> I'm trying to break back into the Linux world
> after shuffling my hard disks all around, but
> I'm doing it slowly and trying a wide range of
> distros.  For starters, I'm playing with live CDs.
>
> I brought up Simply Mepis today and tried to do
> an FTP transfer, but could not find a command
> shell window except by breaking out to the
> Console (Ctrl-Alt-F1), and could not find an
> Xterm except "as root".
>
> I know they are partly trying to make Windows
> users feel comfortable, but they did too good
> a job of disguising Linux as Free Windows.
> This is the first Linux distro I've ever
> seen that didn't have an Xterm launcher on the
> taskbar.
>
> I thought the overall interface was nice, but
> how do you go about lifting the hood on this
> thing?
>
> Also, when I couldn't find a command line, I
> tried bringing up Gftp and was unable to find a
> "connect" button ... never got online with it.
> I tried "transfer" but it said no transfers were
> requested.  It would not bring up my Cox "personal
> web" directory, never tried to make an FTP
> connection at all.  I'm used to FileZilla on
> Windows for example.  It did OK browsing the
> local filesystems.
>
> Another Mepis comment:  I find their designation
> of filesystems to be very confusing, because they
> seem to be calling their ramdisk /dev/hda1.
> Took me a minute to find /mnt/hda1.  (It had no
> problem browsing my NTFS volume.)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Vic
>
> P.S.  Incidentally, I was unable to get Cox to
> hold an FTP connection last night ... turned out
> to be a Cox problem.  I let Mepis sit overnight
> and Cox was ready to do a transfer this morning.
> I've never had this problem with Cox before.
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change  you mail settings:
> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
>