From Mandrake, Redhat, Fedora and SuSE to SimplyMEPIS

I have been using Linux for about 2 years now. I wouldn't say I'm an expert, but maybe a power user. Over the past 2 years I have used Mandrake, Redhat, Fedora, and SuSE. They all have featured I like, but the problems I encountered were worse than the benefits. With Redhat and Fedora I was always in package dependency hell! I got them to run after much sweat and long hours. SuSE work pretty good, except when I upgraded (and paid for that upgrade) to SuSE 9.2. It was so bloated that my P4 Machine with 768MB of DDR pc1200 ram, slowed to a crawl. After some tweaking and removal of junk it was better. Then I tried to sync my Palm Pilot with Evo 2.0. It didn't work, and to make matters worse it destroyed the data on my palm, even though I had it set to "copy from pilot". I upgrade and tweaked, but could not get Evolution 2.0 and Palm to work on SuSE 9.2. The same happened with Fedora Core 3. So I finally went back to FC 2. I tried Mandrake 10.1 on my Laptop only because I could get it to work with my atmel wireless card. My palm only could sync the contacts and nothing else on the Mandrake install on the laptop.

Then I was reading Linux.com and noticed MEPIS in their OS section on the fornt page. I didn't really know much about debian, but MEPIS queued my couriosity since it was a live CD. I tried it on my laptop first and it worked pretty good. I finally did an install and was really inpresses with apt-get and kpackage. Installing packages was a breeze. I installed the atmel driver and wha-la, I was on my wireless network at home. I had to do a few tweaks to get CUPS SMB printing to work, but that info was just a few clicks away on mepis.org. My menu changes would not stay after I rebooted, so a few more click to mepis.org and a slight tweak, once again it was working properly. Now came the moment of truth, I installed Evolution 2.0 with the latest gnome-pilot. I imported my mail flawlessly, then started setting up my palm. I needed to do "ln -s /dev/ttyUSB1 /dev/palm" from the CLI since the default link didn't work (I've experienced that on all the distros). After that, MEPIS saw my Palm and I set it up to sync. It worked perfectly. I had all my contacts, tasks and calendar along with my imported mail. Life was good!
Yesterday I installed SimplyMEPIS 2004.06 on my main workstation at home. Everything is working as expected. I had on little flaw with the sound card. The internal integrated sound was turned on in the BIOS and it conflicted with my PCI Ensoniq card. I Rebooted, disabled the internal card, and it was music to my ears. After that the install went fine, and I am now running MEPIS 2004.06 at home. I think I might just be a permanant MEPIS user.
Now if I can only get the 2.4 kernel to work with my wireless card on the laptop that would be great. The 2.6 kernel locks up the keyboard every now and again.

Bottom Line, Great Work! Keep it up!
I would like to contribute, but all I can do for now is report bugs.