SimplyMepis Linux 8.0.15 Review

I installed SimplyMepis Linux 8.0.15 (Mepis Linux, for short) from  a Install/Live CD. It is a straight forward install. Their disk naming convention through me for a loop, but I got it right on the second install.

The target machine for the install was my rather ancient Dell Inspiron 8100 with 512 MiB of memory. Like the HP pavilion laptop, the Dell is triple booted with three distros of Linux: Mepis 8.0, Mandriva 2010, and openSUSE 10.2. Each of the distros on the HP laptop have their one /home directories. On the Dell laptop they share a common /home directory, with its own partition.

The partitions are sda5 through sda8, with sda8 being /home. Normally, these would map to hda4 through hda7 for Legacy Grub, and older partition programs. I didn’t catch it on my first install, but Mepis Linux maps hda the same as sda. This lead to my overwriting Mepis with Mandriva, and the reinstall of Mepis.

I give Mepis credit for correctly detecting the WiFi card with the Atheros chipset. While it didn’t automatically connect, it only took a few seconds to configure the connection.

If you are looking for a release with the latest kernel and the latest desktop, Mepis is not for you. Mepis uses Linux kernel version 2.6.27, with the KDE 3.5 desktop. For older machines, it is an excellent alternative. Mepis is a Debian derivative, and uses the Lenny repositories.

Except for the minor confusion over hda drive numbering, Mepis was easy to install and ran without problems. After the challenges with the last few reviews, it was nice to have a distro that just worked.