Muskrat’s Web

Mepis 8.0 is working out just fine. I finally got VLC to play my media files, although Kaffiene and mplayer still just show a blue screen. And I’m not sure exactly what it took to get VLC to working. I uninstalled all the codecs and media packages, flushed apt-get and reinstalled everything. Then it just worked. I have a feeling it was just a small bug in the system that is still partly there.

At any rate! I am now using Mepis as my fulltime/main desktop on my laptop.

I was also able to move my Gpodder configuration over from Sabayon (gentoo based) with no glitches. And move my Sylpheed configuration files over from Slackware 12 which was running Gnome SlackBuilt, also with no glitches.

Evolution was the only configuration that gave me problems. And it wasn’t the files that was the problem. I’ve learned that Evolution runs some demons in the back ground and Gnome has some running also even if your in a KDE desktop.

So if you want to move your evolution config files into a new install or just restore from backup here is what I found to work.

First you need the set of files. You’ll need these folders and all their content.
~/.evolution
~/.gconf/apps/evolution

Then before you copy these in, run these two commands.
evolution –force-shutdown
gconftool-2 -shutdown

Then copy in your evolution configuration files, after which you can start Evolution. I found the only thing I lost was the passwords. Which Slackware had in a wallet and required another password to access them. But Mepis isn’t using that method so maybe when I move out of here I won’t even lose them.

So all in all Mepis 8 is a strong robust distro, which has made the grade for me. Which isn’t easy. I’ve used some distros that come highly recommended and find them to be junk. Such as Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Sidux, along with Mint. The Last one to fall down and fail on me was Sabayon a Gentoo based distro.

Each had some major short come, which was just to big a obstacle for me to justify using them full time. Even though each of the above listed distros did impress me, and I tried using them. Ubuntu and Kubuntu were blotted and slowed my system down to much. I like to use my resources, not have the system consume them. Sidux was broken have the time, you never knew when it was safe to do an update/upgrade. Mint follows ubuntu closely, even though they aren’t as blotted, the beef I had with them was the forum community is a little hard nosed about teaching newbies. I got into it with them and of course I lost, since I’m a nobody.

The disagreement was, that I believe people shouldn’t teach absolutes about one distro as if that is Linux wide. The ones in the know such as myself and the leaders on Mint forum should teach newbies that things are done Mint’s way even if other distros have other ways of doing it. The case in point was Mint leaders on the forum was saying never do a systems upgrade. Some even stated never do it on any distro. Yet apt-get has a command which functions in Mint, “apt-get upgrade” which will brake a Mint install for sure, if you mess with the apt/sources.list file. But Debian proper will most generally give you a clean upgrade from one version to another.

Ubuntu does that a lot too. Teach people Ubuntu’s way as if it’s the absolute truth which it isn’t, it’s just a Ubuntu turth. Such as sudo. I will abmit that Ubuntu Forums and User leaders have contributed much to the Linux community at large. But many newbies that have been trained Ubuntus way have to be retrained when They out grow that blotted Distro and wish to move into a finer/sleeker Distro.

That was one reason I never was happy with Mepis, but Mepis developers have changed from being based on Ubuntu, they are now based on Debian. So I tried it again and find it to be a fine fine Distro.

I just recently downloaded and installed Mepis again. I’ll have to say, it has really improved from previous installs I’ve tried. Before it was based on Ubuntu and had the blot inherited from such a blotted upstream distro.

Ubuntu has done some great things for the Linux Community, but they have fallen off the cart in my book, because they have copied M$ in trying to be all things to all people and because of that, have blotted their system to become almost unusable on smaller older boxes.

But Mepis changed their base back to the Granddaddy of all .deb based systems. Debian proper. In my book there is no finer OS. The only drawback to using Debian is there is a lot of heavy lefting left to the end user. So when I find a fine distro like Mepis which has refined the end users experience, making it a plug and play install. I love it.

I installed Mepis 8 on my wife’s IBM T41 laptop, everything worked right out of the box. There was no need to tweak anything. It even sleeps with no problem, waking up as fine as it goes to sleep.

So I put it on my T41, Same results, except for the fact my wife and I use our boxes slitly different. I need more multimedia, and it doesn’t play DVDs, MP4s, or AVIs right out of the box. I haven’t yet got that sorted out. Although since it’s Debian based I’m sure I will.

Then I installed it in my CyberCafe as the main OS, once again without a hitch. So all in all, I have to say Mepis 8 is an outstanding Distro. Few distros install that well on different boxes and preform different task right out of the box. Without some down side, ether blot, or configurability, or some such.

So I believe Mepis will rank higher than it has in the past for me. For now at least, it’s 2nd to my main OS Debian. And that says a lot when it can bump Distros like Open Suse.