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.


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