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Yet Another Debian-based Distro: Mepis
emgarf writes "Today, on the first anniversary of the MEPIS Project, MEPIS LLC announced the release of MEPIS Linux 2003.10 for Pentium processors. MEPIS Linux is a desktop Linux that is designed for both personal and business users. MEPIS Linux offers a live/installation/recovery CD, advanced automatic hardware configuration, XP/NTFS support, ACPI power management, WiFi support, personal firewall, KDE 3.1.4, OpenOffice 1.1, Mozilla 1.5, and much more."
At last a versioning scheme unaffected by marketing! "2003.10" is actually informative!
I've long told my friend eric that what linux needed more than anything was an easy to install (think redhat or mandrake) debian based distro. Is this the first distro like that? I wish mandrake would stop using rpms and use debian's apt repository to handle software installing/updating, but alas it seems impossible for Mandrake developers to pull their head out of their ass and realize that rpms are not the way to go.
- tristan
What I'd really like to see is someone taking advantage of the capabilities of distros like Knoppix to create a bootable disk management tool.
I'd love to see a distro that I could boot with drive imaging software (local, network, with support for almost any kind of media,) partition editing (with support for non-destructive resizing of all filesystems including NTFS.)
Preferrably it would have both command line and good GUI based utilities (I find partitioning a disk to be easier when I see things in a bar or pie graph, as opposed to 2048byte blocks.)
Sorta like a blend of Ghost and Partition Magic, except more powerful and free. This came to mind after trying to use Norton Ghost to image out to a firewire hard drive, and trying to image with dd. Ghost "supports" firewire but includes no drivers for any devices, and dd would have worked, but I was trying to stick it on a FAT32 partition (didn't feel like making a 5GB ext2 partition just to have windows bugging me to let it destroy the thing.)
Anyone know of a project like this?
So the trend would be towards using... Debian then, seeing as how Knoppix == Debian+extras.
I had the opportunity to meet Warren and participate in a 2 hour interactive demo of the then latest build of Mepis a couple months ago right here in Parkersburg, WV at a Mid Ohio Valley Linux Users Group meeting. I was VERY impressed both with the distro, and with Warren's EXCELLENT ability to continue adding "Oh yeah!" features that you wish you could find in most Linux distros (For example, the ability to use the CD as a portable graphical partition manager, internet terminal, etc) along the lines of Knoppix. At that time, the "next major feature" he was hammering out was the ability to store your home directory and such on thumbdrives (Does Knoppix do this now?).
Although Mepis looked pretty damned solid and useful, what grabbed me the most was Warren's willingness and outright enthusiasm regarding feedback. This guy is SERIOUS about trying to listen to EVERYBODY regarding the project in order to improve it and make it something that everybody wants to use. He not only is producing the distro to achieve personal goals, but he genuinely is in it for "the people", programmers and users alike.
If you've ever wanted to really make a difference in the development of a growing and powerful distro, this is a good one to check out.
What other distro teams or people have you all had exceptional interactive experiences with?
>ntfs support as in both read AND WRITE support?
Although I heed the warnings and don't use it on anything important, NTFS read/write support has not been a problem. I've been using it since 2.2.
It would be good to know what specific problems are anticipated and under what circumstances they should manifest. Is there a doc resource for this?
I'm guessing the problems will be more serious if you use windows, for instance, hibernating a windows session then writing its filesystem, stuff like that. I haven't really looked hard, but, I haven't seen a report of any actual problems experienced with NTFS r/w.
What I'd rather see is a good ReiserFS that can be used for the root filesystem on WindowsXP. Not holding my breath of course.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.