So, there is a beta 4

[benjaminq]

Based on the Dapper -Pool from 25th May (that should be the RC) there is a new beta from Mepis. Another Beta is announced before one single RC. Si it seems that although Ubunut gets lots of extra polish, Warren is still going "the extra mile". If he would make the last step (namely GPL his own tools as promised), Mepis would really take off an make Kubuntu obsolete.

I am downloading the beta 4, test it and this time install it.

Some major changes from the announcement: GIMP has been dropped in favour of XaraLX and digikam plugins. I guess this is not a very popular decision, but GIMP is of course available through the software pool in the repository. XaraLX is a promising vector drawing application in the class of Corel Draw. I find it nevertheless a bit early to implement it since this newest version (0.5) is a development version that lacks a lot of stuff, printing capabilities to name the most important one for me ...

Maybe Mepis should start to offer a DVD.iso ... and create a real best of breed plus some hot stuff (like XaraLx) ... I have a broadband connection, so I won't miss GIMP very long, but there still are a host of people that need a fully functional package out of the box.

Let's see, I keep you posted about performance and installation.

Benjamin

[fos]

I can't believe they dropped Gimp, with the popularity of digital imaging, it is included in just about every distro.

I was browsing the Ubuntu forum yesterday. A number of testers on the Dapper section don't think it will be ready for ready for release on June 1st. They complain about upgrade problems. Others say to just do a clean install instead. A clean install didn't work for me, it crashed. The first is only a couple of days away.

fos...

[benjaminq]

Dropping is perhaps a little bit hard said, since it is an apt-get away, at least for many people. But you're right, it is a strage decision.

I have installed the beta4 now. What I said for the beta3 in the previous topic stays 100% valid here. The WLAN card that to date always needed manual configuration with ndiswrapper and the windows driver just worked out of the box, I gave it an essid and thats it. Remarkably this setting was preserved when I installed MEPIS from the live mode, so at bootup the connection was immediately established. Grade A+

For the rest, I changed the eye candy, installed a couple of programs, activated the PLF repository that was already sleeping in the sources.lst to get the usual multimedia codecs, lib_dvd_css, JRE, Acrobat, etc. and I have grabbed a newer version of Opera 9 beta2, added gtk-engines2-gtk-qt to give Firefox and the other GTK apps a KDEish style, imported some settings from my existing LN installation, ... no glitches, no bugs. Hardware detection was wonderful. Sound works, Touchpad, wirless mouse, HP PSC 2355, external DVD writer, external mass storage devices work, digital cameras (canon IXUS and Panasonic (mass storage)), iRiver H120, everything I threw at it.

The only small thing is that the mount points are nor named according to the devices, but /media/sdx1 but this is really the only thing that might be considered as improvable. Tomorrow I'll test the Bluetooth capabilities and try to say something about power saving.

Performance is not so bad, relatively short boot time, the apps are quite responsive and the memory footprint after several hours of heavy use tells me that the istallation has yet not used any swap.

This beta 4 leaves a really really good impression. I'm impressed. No need to wait for the final release from my point of view.

:D BEnjamin

[danieldk]

Especially strange, because vector drawing (Xara) and image processing (The GIMP) are different things.

[benjaminq]

On the other hand it's a "service" for the "old hands", since XaraLx does not yet exist as *.dep package (or at least I haven't found one), while everybody knows (and gets) GIMP.

I am struggling a bit with bluetooth issues now, but all the rest just runs fine, even the locale-bug from OpenOffice that I had (which exaclty spoken was a locale bug from LN) was absent.

Benjamin

[benjaminq]

THis is what I really h*te about Linux: Under distro A Kpilot 3.5.1 works with a little twiggling under the next distro it (3.5.2) insists on crashing. Under one distro you get Bluetooth to work, you are happy, you write a howto for others and on the next distro you can plainly throw your howto away, one distro lets you sync your SMS with kmobiletools the next one does not (same version kmobiletools).

So Mepis 6 beta 4 does it that way: no proper bluetooth -> no kmobiletools and kpilot is unusable. Forcing kpilot to a lower version doesn't work. Maybe I had big luck before, but MEPIS does not cooperate with my "little helpers" (phone, Z22).

So maybe a Ubuntu or Mepis forum visit will enlighten me ... ???

[kmoffat]

Especially strange, because vector drawing (Xara) and image processing (The GIMP) are different things.

Plus, it is very incomplete according to the website, no printing and a long list of other missing features.

[bhobjj]

Especially strange, because vector drawing (Xara) and image processing (The GIMP) are different things.

Plus, it is very incomplete according to the website, no printing and a long list of other missing features.

Someone should send Warren a couple pounds of coffee.

-BoB