MEPIS Linux on the Rise [LWN.net]

MEPIS Linux on the Rise

Posted Nov 24, 2004 8:27 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185)
Parent article: MEPIS Linux on the Rise

Having become disenchanted with SuSE recently, I've been trying out a few
debian-based distributions: Debian (with the new netinstaller), Ubuntu,
Knoppix and Mepis. All of them fell short on one or more points.

Ubuntu and plain Debian did attempt to recognize the other installed linux
distributions, put entries in Grub, but all the entries but the one for
Debian were wrong. Ubuntu, while nice, didn't include KDE, of course, and
had some other niggles. Plain Debian didn't want to run X11 at the full
1600x1200 resultion of my laptop.

Mepis would only boot a 2.4 kernel, didn't want to play with my Lucent
wavelan wifi card (which every other distribution recognized). The much
praised graphical configuration tools turned out to be a disaster because
it didn't want to show my mouse cursor until I had installed the nvidia
drivers and the tab order of those dialogs is completely screwed.

All in all, I still haven't succeeded in tweaking even one of the Debian
based distributions to enable me to do what I want: work in C++ on KOffice
and Java for Tryllian, handle my mailbox and watch the occasional dvd.

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MEPIS Linux on the Rise

Posted Nov 24, 2004 21:31 UTC (Wed) by a9db0 (subscriber, #2181) [Link]

Hmmm.

First, I would suggest dropping by the forums at either Mepis.org or Mepislovers.com. Help is available, and if there are issues specific to your hardware Warren will want to know so they can be fixed in future releases.

It's odd that you've had trouble related to nVidia video. I've got a nVidia based system - chipset and video - and it has worked fine on multiple installs. (Disclamer: I'm on the beta team, so I reinstall quite a bit.) This is the wrong place for support, so I urge you to drop by the forums.

Dave

MEPIS Linux on the Rise

Posted Nov 25, 2004 21:16 UTC (Thu) by jeffmccoy (guest, #14078) [Link]

You might also want to try Kanotix. It's based on Debian/Knoppix with some tweaks added, and while Knoppix is mainly focused on being a livecd, Kanotix is usually intended for eventual hard drive install. While I liked Mepis a lot, Kanotix has been a better fit for my laptop (Toshiba A75) - video is working, sound, dvds play fine, touchpad works, wireless (atheros/madwifi), etc. You didn't say what computer you had, but if it's a laptop and you're having trouble finding a distro where everything just works, I'd try Kanotix.