simplyMEpis

History

It has been at least 3 years since I started my journey in the Linux world. The first computer I owned (Actually I borrowed it from my girlfriend) was a PC with AMD K5 166 MHz CPU, 32 MB EDO-RAM, 2.3 GB Western Digital HD, 8x CD-ROM Drive and 4 MB Graphics Card. That was the year 2003. Unfortunately, my first operating system on that computer was MS Windows 95 and the main job of the PC was assisting me with my Bachelor's thesis' typesetting. Later that year, I upgraded(!) the machine to 64 MB of RAM, and armored with a 52x CD-ROM Drive and a 3 GB SeaGate HD as slave after a long bargain hunt on the backstreets of Istanbul's Computer Bazaar in Kadikoy. Then I decided it was time to give MS Windows 98 a try.

In early 2004, I decided to build up my own machine from scratch, a PC with Intel Pentium 4 2.26 GHz CPU, 256 MB DDR RAM, 80 GB Samsung HD, a 52x CD-Writer and on-board graphics and sound cards. I installed MS Windows XP to that machine. So, with a quick glance, it was clear that I paced the pavements of Redmond in sequence.

After I graduated from university, I moved back to my hometown in the summer of 2004. There I spend some time deceiving myself with the toys of Redmond until the truth happened. It was autumn when I first met Linux. It was my first distro shipped with a computer magazine, the Mandrake 10.1. I was so excited to install that on my machine. The first impression on me was great. Everything seemed to work out of the box. No driver installs, no software routines. And best of all, no malware. Linux had it all. Multimedia apps, office suite, instant messenger...But those were the days when I had to use dial-up connection to the internet. The only drawback was I couldn't configured my winmodem in Linux to connect the internet. Pity, but the joy of open source made me forget that. So for a couple of months I used Mandrake as my workstation and Windows XP as internet box.

In February 2005, I started to pursue an MSc career in marine biology in an institute not far away from my hometown. So I moved to the campus and started a living of academics again. There I felt the necessity to buy a laptop computer in order to be able to work independently, to be able to carry it to my office during the day and back to my hut in the evening. After a long investigation in computer stores I bought an Acer Aspire 1362LCi with AMD Sempron Mobile 2800 CPU, 40 GB HD, DVD-ROM, 15'' LCD and 64 MB NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 graphics card. And my never ending journey began...

A long journey to take...

On my new laptop, first I installed Fedora Core 4. I was happy with the result but my wireless card and cpu frequence scaling were out of order. For I run heavy tasks on my computer such as running scripts in MATLAB to process gigantic ASCII files, the cpu frequency scaling was a must because after some time the machine closed itself down. And my experience in Linux was yet so little, I switched to another distro, openSUSE 10. With SUSE, cpu frequency scaling worked out of the box but wireless didn't function. And also my Synaptics touchpad had problems. A long time I ignored the touchpad's malfunctioning and the wireless-less-ness. I was so happy with Yast2. After a couple of weeks, I decided to give Fedora Core 5 a try. FC 5 was excellent on my hardware, cpu freq. scaling was working and I was able to load my wireless driver with ndiswrapper. A new hope? No, again wireless didn't work. FC 5 saw the wireless card and the driver but couldn't start it somehow.
I don't even mention the suspend2ram and hibernate functions. Of course, they were not working either but in fact I have never really cared for those functionalities. And even if the frequency scaling, my MATLAB scripts' processes caused Fedora to shutdown immediately after some time of huge load. Well, and you know what? That started a period in my life when I frequently installed new distros of Linux on my laptop to see which capabilities each distro have out of the box. I tried openSUSE 10.1,10.2; Fedora 7; Slackware 10.2,11; Zenwalk 4.6; Debian 3.1; Vector 5.8; Knoppix; Mandriva; Ubuntu; Slax; Elive; PCLinuxOS; Foresight; DSL; Linux Mint and finally simplyMEPIS.

Lessons learned

After all those struggling in the pool of linux distros, if someone asks me which distros were close to make it, I can say that openSUSE, Fedora Core 5, Debian, Vector, Slackware and simplyMEPIS were the ones shined among others. I can assure you that there is no perfect distro out there waiting for you to discover. There are good distros, some are so close to make it and others are too far away yet. Before you decide just sit down and think foe a while...What do you really need? Let's give an example:

Me, I use my computer as a workstation. I use MATLAB language, NCAR Command Language and NCAR Graphics. I need glibc 2.4 or above for these to function. But I need my wireless to work also as well as cpu frequency scaling. So investigate a little bit in distrowatch.com and find some distros that come close to your criteria. Then you may pick one of them. And later you may customize your distro a little bit more after you install. And give live CDs a try before you make your mind.

simplyMEPIS

All those years and all those struggles helped me find simplyMEPIS at last. Now my wireless works, I updated to glibc 2.4 via apt-get and cpu frequency scaling works flawlessly. And KDE comes with its welcoming arms. I thank you to the people who made simplyMEPIS so real and alive. So customizable and so flexible...