Is SimplyMEPIS 3.4-3 RC 3 ready for final release?

No problems here, am I the only one?
I heard that there are some small issues with the floppy but I don't use one.

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Nah, it works fine for me. I don't know if I'm too glad about the package selection (e.g. I still prefer lightweight XMMS for shoutcast streams rather than Kaffeine), but that's a matter of fetching it from the pools. I also feel the mozilla plugin has not been tweaked optimally, but again, minor detail. Technically, it seems flawless so far.

Newbie or not Newbie, there's always a question

People really really depend on that magic word STABLE
3.3.1-1 was a masterpiece that has withstood the test of time
and is still functionally perfect....

Let's make sure we can say the same about -3 a year from now
cause we took a little more time to kick the tires...

There is no CD icon on my laptop screen nore in the Storage Media, and nothing I have tried ( ediditing the fstab ) has has got it to work.
I realy do think this needs more work.
Regards Jim

"There is no CD icon on my laptop screen nore in the Storage Media, and nothing I have tried ( ediditing the fstab ) has has got it to work.
I realy do think this needs more work."

Did you try to insert a CD? The icon should appear when you insert a CD.

BTW, can anyone pin this thread -- make it appear to the top, because it's kind of important to have as much feedback as posible.

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It's too early to answer this question. Give us all at least the seven days allowed by the dev team for feedback. I need to install/set up and then use the rc on three separate machines, which takes a while.

Irv

I am having one small problem with the floppy. Once it reconizes the first disk, you can not unmount it and place another floppy in. System complain that media/df0 in not mounted (according to mtab) but the desk icon shows it open. Everything else works great, even my hp6210 all in one printer/scanner. The floppy is the only reason I would not final release 3.4-3 for us noobies.

-No cdrom or fdd entry in fstab running live cd.
-no contents displayed when in konq,services,storage media, click on any one of 10 partitions.

Yup,

CD problems prevent me from saying Go Final. Where is it? I use K3B to force a CD to mount, but that initially says "malformed url" before it forces the mount. dev@mepis told me that the CD/DVD is no longer in fstab, but is is in /media when mounted, I see the floppy there but no CD.

And what's with the sized partitions on the desktop and not the partition ID?

Small problems with floppy, but I hear this is being worked on.

No, not ready for the Newbie, and if the reputation is to hold, then it must be practically Newbie-Proof.

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I shot an arrow into the air. It stuck! Anon

Mepis is the best going, but I can't use it on my laptop when away from power source because the power monitoring doesn't work on my Acer. Many advantages over other, but that is a show stopper for a laptop.
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Ken

I just downloaded MepisLite 3.3.2-1 RC1 and find it is far superior. First of all the "onthego" feature works very nicely, or at least as advertised. I could not create an "onthego" disk at all with any of the 3.4 release candidates. I now know the reason is the iso file was not being written to the USB Key drive. To tell you the truth, since I cannot get my scanner working on 3.4.3, there would be absolutely no point in upgrading or bothering to recommend it to anyone. In fact I would advise anyone considering it, to avoid it. It just isn't ready for public consumption. I wrote a thread a few days ago about Mepis being at a critical juncture. Right now Mepis is known as a high quality bug free distribution. While some here seem to think 3.4.3 is just fine, I can assure you that it isn't. If you are going to release it, it should be called Mepis M$ or Mepis Raw.

I have been trying many distributions while waiting for a new Mepis release. Here's how I rate them:

1. Kanotix - a very speedy live CD that's very well configured. While not perfectly to my liking, there are no severe bugs. I have suggested improvements but have not submitted bug complaints. Plays Internet Radio KPOJ out of the box, but does not scan.

2. The version of Mepis I have installed on my hard drive. I'm not sure exactly what it is, as I upgraded it through Synaptic until the Debian servers changed their addresses. That's what put me in a pickle. However this Mepis system has worked flawlessly for about the past year, and I believe it was Mepis 2004-10 that I used for the year before that. These older versions of Mepis are the finest operating systems I have ever used, with includes 7 years on Macs with the public school system. The only thing wrong with this system is the sources list, and the fact that it doesn't scan (HP PSC 1210).

3. MepisLite 3.3.2-1 RC1. Very good. Very smooth. Seemingly few bugs. The "persistent home" (onthego) is superior to Kanotix which can be flaky at times most likely due to the infamous "udev" MepisLite wants to play KPOJ. It acts like it's playing it, but you can't hear any sound.

4. Damn Small Linux. This is a superb little system. It is very well conceived and works beautifully. I haven't used it much though because I require a more full fledge word processor and prefer drag and drop file management. Also doesn't scan or play Internet radio

5. Kubuntu 5.10 Bravo it scans! Overall though it's kind of primitive, and not really of Mepis quality. I have it on a spare drive and will boot to it only when I need to scan a document.

6. Open SuSE 10.0. Good bloatware distro which takes an afternoon to download and install. It does scan, but the udev is totally schizo with dive names changing constantly depending on what tool you open up. I couldn't really recommend it unless you are absolutely desperate for a scanner, because it does scan. Ipod management is a nightmare because of the total instability of drive and USB management.

7. Fox Linux. Interesting because it looks like OSX. Seems deficient in many multi-media areas though.

8. Fedora Core 4. Bravo, udev sort of works, but even then drive names change depending on the tool or file manager. Basically it's a crude bloatware distro with no control panel. I really don't know why it has the popularity that it does.

9. Mepis 3.4.3-wahteva - Actually a complete POS that isn't' even worthy of discussing the the context of these other distros. It has nothing of value to offer. I recommend any of the other distros over it as I don't even recommended trying it all. It's basically a waste of time. I would suggest trying Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Xandros, Linspire, almost anything other than Mepis 3.4.3

Please don't kill the messenger. I'm a long time loyal Mepis user, but I have nothing positive to say about 3.4.3

Posted from a Live Kanotix 2005-4 CD with a persistent USB home. By the way I have been listening to KPOJ all the time while writing this post.

People have suggested on the Kanotix Forum that it would be better with the look and feel of Mepis. I think a winning combo would be for Warren to team up with Kano and provide the Mepis touch to Kanotix's solid base. Steal the scanning programs from Kubuntu and that would be a real winning system.

My only problem so far was when I tried to boot the livecd with some other resolution that 1024x768. The install stalled out. But it worked without a hitch on 1024x768.
Jim A.

Only one site out of both the US and foreign URLs will respond to a click, and that one allows only about 70KB/sec download.

However I have installed MEPIS 3.4.3.rc1 on one laptop and two desktops, and I've upgraded them all to KDE 3.5. The Gateway m675prr laptop performs perfectly, including the ability to read pics from my KODAK DX7360 digital camera. The DELL GX260 runs perfectly, as does the 1GHz whitebox.

I'd love to try the latest release but waiting three hours for a DL is not in my game plan.
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GreyGeek

You could use Bittorrent (Azureus client) http://linuxtracker.org/download.php?id=1323&name=SimplyMEPIS.torrent

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In my opinion, absolutely not. There are several issues that need to be addressed in order for this release to be as solid as some others; 3.3.2test03 was great for me.

When first booting the LiveCD, I have to add "xdrvr=vesa" in order to proceed and completely log in. To be fair, though, some other distros I've tried also needed this tweak.

Each time I reboot, I have to go into the OS Center>Network Interface in order to start up eth0. In fact, each time I boot, there is a message that the card I have isn't being recognized and I should try "8139too", which is the proper driver. I've edited this in "etc/modules", but that doesn't help. I've even tried the fix CBlue posted on the front page of the mepislovers site, but that hasn't worked, either.

Most importantly, however, is the problem I'm having with the internet and Synaptic not working very well unless my mouse pointer is moving. Isn't that strange? As soon as I stop moving the mouse, speed drops to almost nothing; move the mouse and downloading and surfing are pretty good.

As I've mentioned in other posts, this is not an issue with Ubuntu's LiveCd (4.10), so I'm bewildered as to why it is an issue with our wonderful Mepis. The Ubuntu name was just for reference, btw. I am a Mepis user to the core. Why can't whatever makes it work in Ubuntu be incorporated into Mepis in order to fix this weird problem?

Fix "devices" in Konqueror, too.

Warren and team are the best, and my hat is off to them. Even if this goes gold, which I hope won't happen now, I will patiently await the next release, hoping problems will have been resolved by then. Most everything works here; printers, including scanning are up and running, all my favorite programs work, but this internet and mouse thing are buggy, at best.

Pastor Ron

This version of Mepis blows away the earlier ones I've run. The only 2 things annoying me right now is libdvdcss2 and w32codecs not being in the repository by default. What is the (un)official source for these to add to synaptic?

"The only 2 things annoying me right now is libdvdcss2 and w32codecs not being in the repository by default."

They will never be included, because it is not legal to include them. Blame patent system and politicians.

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I voted yes. Everything works, even my Canon A40 camera which was not detected in earlier RC's due to permissions bug.

Firefox runs very fast. I had to reinstall the mplayer plugin though to get it to play streaming media.

I find it very responsive. Have switched from PCLinux to Mepis since trying the latest RC. PCLOS is a great OS but the fact that Mepis is Debian based is a major plus for me.

Great work Warren.

Hope all that are having issues can get them resolved.

You can please all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you can't please all of the people all of the time.

I appreciate the idea of a poll and appealing to the users to help decide what to do but I think from the comments here you're seeing what the real issue is. Some people will never be happy no matter what. You're not going to support someone's favorite package, it's not going to work with someone's $15 scanner they've had for 10 years, it doesn't boot properly with the 10 other distros I have loaded on the same hard drive.

I'm all for everyone using linux like they want and in fact I believe that's why it's great we have over a hundred various distros to try. Please release and let's move on to the next step, 3.5, so people can complain that it doesn't support KDE 3.6.

I guess you can tell my vote is - RELEASE - please.

Darrell

The /etc/rc3.d/S20ssh link seems to be missing, so after installation, the ssh daemon isn't running.

rc2.1 worked better for me than rc3

in 3 It wont install to my SATA drive unless I disconect ant PATA drives. One of my PATA drives after I installed now has a segmentation fault. I don't really think Mepis did that exactly but it may have contributed.
I went ahead and put 2.1 back on.

Still have the invisible mouse pointer issue...

not yet when i ran synaptic it returned all errors for all the repositories.

Can't get my main wireless card (Netgear WG511T - Athereos based 802.11g) to work.
OSCenter does not show any wireless devices when the card is plugged in.
Had to fallback on older 802.11b.

After changing the eth0 to static IP address in OSCenter
the interface won't start at all.
Does anyone have a solution?

R50 IBM laptop.
* CD only worked 1 out of 4 installs, bad luck for me it was the 1st install.
* Floppy worked 2 out of 4 installs.
* Everything else just sings.
Fastest MEPIS yet, will be the best when udev is worked out.
Not gold just yet.
NH

People who reported CD-ROM problem: CD icon is not supposed to show on Desktop unless you put in a CD, can you try this with a clean install (not after you screwed with your fstab file) and report back?

I would hate for such a simple thing to be reported as a "bug" -- I mean I don't doubt that there might be real problems, I just want to eliminate a possible confusion.

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I understand about the "legal" issues with css and codecs, I just wish there was a clear place to know how to get these. Resorted to Google and found them.

After using it for a day, I've found a couple other issues. Firstly, networking is still squirrely. My laptop has a built-in eth0 port and a wireless eth1 adapter. I never connect a cable to eth0 and want to always only use the wireless eth1 connection. However, after every reboot, eth0 is still active which makes things slow as it always tries to use it, then times out when it cannot resolve and falls back to wireless. I can go to OS center and disable eth0 then things fly as wireless is primary, as it should be. Even though I select eth0 to NOT start at boot, it still is.

The other issue is ACPI. This worked in the previous version of Mepis I had installed. I used to be able to suspend to ram using the klaptop monitor in the systray or by closing the lid. Now, neither work. It tries and the screen becomes text for a moment then returns me to KDE. Something displayed about 2 not being a valid state?

SSH was not running by default. Easy fix but had to install ksysv first to make it "simpler." It'd be nice to see this loaded and already configured (Linux/Debian) upon a fresh install.

Other than that, it rocks! nVidia works great and available at install time. Synaptic is good once you do an Update the first time you use it to get rid of the error messages.