SimplyMepis 3.3.1 Review

[Josh Coffman]

Hi all,

  This was one of the distros I tried in picking the
distro to replace windows. I was new to linux then
(still am mostly).

  The hardware: HP Pavilion laptop z5440. AMD XP
3000+, 60 gig drive, 512meg ram, DVD/CDRW, ALPS
touchpad w/ scroll, Broadcom Wireless OnBoard,
Geforce4 440 GO (32meg), 15.4 inch wxga screen.

  LiveCD: Especially since I'm new to linux, I like
being able to test drive before I buy (install) a
distro. It takes a little while to boot, but is
decently responsive once booted. I like that the Live
boot lets you choose the 2.4 or the 2.6 kernel even
though I don't need the choice. 

  Unlike other LiveCD's I tried, it also offers
install and recovery utilities from the live session. 

  The install is super easy, but can also do more
advanced partitioning. if you know what you're doing.
(I got myself into trouble a couple times because I
didn't know what I was doing exactly.)

  The liveCD recovery utils also help me recover from
my own stupidity a couple times by both being able to
re-install GRUB and restore X config settings.

  Software: I found that some of the software was a
little behind in version. Typical Debian.. wait for
stable releases. Personally, I like OpenOffice a lot
and find it very stable in its current Beta. You can
still get it from unstable repos. Really it was fairly
complete as a desktop, but I didn't try to go into
stuff like apache or development.

  Hardware: This is probably where Mepis initially
won. Most stuff was supported by all distros; some
with config tweaking such as the display. Mepis was
the only one to detect and use my Broadcom wifi
without any input from me! That's huge for a newb. It
comes with ndiswrapper and apparently the right wni
drivers for my broadcom. Really I didn't see any other
huge differences from other distros. Typically, the
ALPS touchpad didn't work, but my USB mouse could be
used even unplugging/plugging it.

  Likes: Ease of use, install, recovery tools. KDE
menus fairly intuitive. I also like Apt and Synaptic.

  Complaints: On shutdown, the screen text was
unreadable. (looking back this was probably driver
related; never installed the nvidia drivers.) Boot was
really slow, but it may be that I had a lot of
unnecessary things turned on. (Hey, I was and still am
new to linux). Not as huge, but the Theme defaults are
not as pretty as other distros I've tried. that is
easily changed though.

-j



		
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