Anyone using Mephis 834
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On Sun, 24 Apr 2005 21:55:34 +0000, Al. C I'm discovering this! I never heard of Mephis before and the last thing I wanted was to invest time in...
George Graves poked his little head through the XP firewall and said: No software for Linux! You are daft. First, lets look at the free stuff...
Sammy Lister
There are a LOT of people using Mepis. There are two or three Q-A websites for it. And everyone who has tried Kubuntu says that it can't touch Mepis for stability and "just working." (I have not tried Kub.)
I started with MDK a few years ago but have run Slackware 8 for the past two years on our workstations. About 2 months ago it was time to upgrade to Slackware 10. That's a major PITA as any Slacker will tell you, as there is a ton of 'after install' stuff you need to do since Slackware does not 'hold your hand' a whole lot and does not do much pre-config stuff for you. YOU have to tweak PHP and MySQL, and even an init script in order to boot to KDE instead of a command line (not a big deal since we don't re-boot often... except the laptops).
I'd heard a lot about Mepis, saw that it gets a lot of hits on Distrowatch, and of course I knew the Deb package manager was highly regarded by 'those who know'. So for the hell of it I burned a CD and ran Mepis off of it (I really liked the 'try before you commit' concept.)
Whoa! Everything worked on CD. Sound, video, network (DHCP), printing, GIMP, K3b, the whole enchilada! So I installed it on the HD of one of my boxen to see how long it would last before it went 'breasts up.' It never did. So instead of playing 'slap and tickle' with Slackware, after a month I installed Mepis on most of our other machines and have not looked back.
In my opinion Mepis is what I've always wanted in Linux. It's a one-CD distro so there is not much bloat, I can try it first by running off of the CD, it has a slam-dunk easy install, and when the install is done everything works. The bonus is that if you want to install other stuff (we put PHP and MySQL on some workstations Mepis comes with Apache2) ) apt-get makes it soooooooo simple. The Debian engineers pre-configure packages so that they just work after the install. There was no screwing around with PHP or MySQL, etc. We also pop Acrobat Reader and Crossover Office for M$ Word on some machines and they all work just fine, thank you. (Mepis comes with O.Office, but some folks just like Word so we install it for them).
I don't think that anybody is characterizing Linux as "poo" here. It's the misleading idea that Linux can replace Windows and the Mac as THE desktop solution, that's in question here...
I was concerned that since Mepis is built upon Debian 'unstable' that things might break. On a few machines we've been doing "apt-get update" every Sunday and an 'upgrade' each Monday morning and so far we have not had any problems. (Ok, there was one today. An upgrade of Apache2 did not re-start the Apache2 server on my machine and I had to 'apache2ctl start' it by hand (I should have shut it down ahead of time but forgot.)
I don't say that Mepis is better than any other distro, but it sure works well for our little company and it might work well for you also. It's simple to try. You download the ISO, burn it to CD, boot to it, and if you like it you install it from the CD (and the CD later acts as a rescue disk should you do something stupid as root! And yes I have!)
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