The Story of MEPIS

MEPIS LLC and MEPIS Linux were founded by industry veteran Warren Woodford in November 2002. Warren had tried several distributions of Linux, but found that they all fell short of his vision for how a Linux desktop should work. Inspired by his experience as a NeXT developer, Warren decided to try his hand at creating a Linux distribution that “just works.” The first version of MEPIS Linux was released to the public in May 2003. By September 2003, MEPIS had jumped to #10 at distrowatch.com.

In January 2004, Joe Barr at NewsForge called MEPIS Linux “the best value for the money of any Linux distribution I've tried yet” and declared it the Debian-based distro that was “most likely to succeed.” Word continued to spread about “the little distro from West Virginia that rocks” (Joe Barr, Newsforge). After the release of SimplyMEPIS in August, MEPIS climbed to #6 at distrowatch.com and eventually hit #1 in January 2005.

In 2006, MEPIS transitioned from using Debian packages to using Ubuntu packages. SimplyMEPIS 6.0, released in July 2006, is the first version of MEPIS to incorporate the Ubuntu packages and repositories. The MEPIS team has plans to begin work on a 64-bit version of SimplyMEPIS, as well as new releases of MEPISLite and ForensicMEPIS.

MEPIS is excited about the progress that has been made, but there is always more to be done. We are striving to take Linux to the next level, developing products that are even easier to use and that work right out of the box. MEPIS is committed to creating innovative features and products that are easy to try, easy to install, and easy to use.