Review: SimplyMepis 7.0 (Page 1 of 1)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Jan 30, 2008 at 12:55pm
Section:
Reviews
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SimplyMepis, or just Mepis for short, is a distribution built
around an idea of being as simple for a new user as possible. I've heard a lot of
talk about Mepis lately, especially with its fan base being nearly as outspoken and
zealous as those in the Ubuntu community, yet I've never really tried it before. But
given that I've heard so many glowing comments and reviews about it, I thought to take it
for a spin myself and see what all the hype and fuss was about.
LiveCD
SimplyMepis comes with a LiveCD option, or the ability to install the distribution to
your hard drive. Upon booting the disk, you're greeted with a simple boot screen
that includes seven options for you to choose from. They are:
- Default (for most systems)
- Run CD with R/W (if 1gb Ram or more)
- 60hz (for digital monitors)
- 75hz (careful! may damage digital monitors)
- VESA (alternate display driver or if vmware)
- Failsafe (minimum options, small display)
- Memtest (test system memory)
All of the available options listed, including the short descriptions next to each
really lend credibility to the "designed for new users" claim. For my test
I booted into the default configuration and let it load completely. From prompt to
desktop takes about three to five minutes, depending on your system, and follows through
several stages of loading, including a text based and initial graphical mode.
There's also an option that'll allow you to drop back to the text based loading screen
from the initial graphical one if you want to right up until Xorg loads.
Upon loading into the desktop you're greeted with the typical login screen. There
are two default users in the livecd version. Demo and Root. Both are
essentially the same, except that in the root login you don't have to ask permission to do
certain administrative tasks. Once on the desktop, you're greeted with a very nicely
done KDE desktop. Mepis 7 uses KDE 3.5.8, which is the latest version of KDE on the
3.5.x branch. Hardware detection is done amazingly well and not only is the right
card and resolution for my desktop chosen, but so is all the other hardware in my system.
There are a few semantics about the layout I don't like (85% width task bar rather
than the standard 100%, etc), but that's mostly personal preference and can easily be
adjusted.
The icon set used in Mepis 7 is quite stunning. Not as vividly stunning as some
other sets I've seen, but at the same time it works well with the setup, so I consider it
to be well chosen. The speed of the system in the livecd environment is very good.
No real complaints there at all. The list of available applications in the
livecd environment is a little thinner than I expected, but there are a lot of major heavy
hitters that are present by default, such as Firefox and Open Office. Network file
sharing support is also good here as well, although there's no way to save the password to
automate logging into a network share. A little bothersome and annoying, but easily
fixable should the developers choose to make the login info savable.
Now let's move on to the installation and see what Mepis 7 has to offer there.
Installation
Getting started with the install is quite simple. Just read the terms of use,
agree, and click next to get started. The rest of the way the installer essentially
holds your hand and provides you with instructions on everything you need to know and do
to get going. The first thing is to choose a disk to install to, install method and
then click next. The installer does give you the option to manually partition your
disks if you want to, or let the Mepis installer handle that. I personally think the
way this is organized will cause confusion among new users as it looks like the manual
partitioning of the drive is the required second part of step 1 when it's really not.
This could be better served by having step 1c (step 1, part 3) as step 1b (step 1,
part 2) and leave the option for manually partitioning the drive out of view until the
user chooses to manually partition the drive. Otherwise, it should be assumed the
user wants to use the entire disk. Since this is a distribution that focuses on new
users, that little bit of clarification is important. Especially when it's someone
who doesn't know what they're doing.
On the next step, you're prompted whether to format the drive now or not. A
simple yes gets you started. Then you just have to wait until that's completed
before you'll be allowed to go on to the next step. I find it interesting that it
tells you what it's doing along the way. Things such as formatting the swap
partition, copying the new system and more. I think that this feedback is important
to new users as it tells them everything is going as designed and keeps them updated as
the installer does its work.
After it's completed its copying and formatting step, you're sent forward to step four
(yes, steps 2 and 3 are handled on the same screen) where you're asked about installing
grub as the boot manager, or configuring boot management yourself with initrd. The
second option though is only for experts. For most other users, clicking next here
is all that's needed. After clicking next you're asked to confirm if you want to
install grub. Once you're done with that, the rest is pretty much just clicking next
until you reach step 8, provided there's nothing in each of these fields that needs to be
addressed. For the average home user, no changes will need to be made here.
Step 8 is a quick process of setting up the default user and root logins. There
is no step 9. The last thing you'll see is just a reminder about certain resources
that may be useful to you. You're then asked to reboot. Just click yes and
you're on your way to a fully installed Mepis experience. Now let's look at what an
installed system looks like and what it can offer you.
The Desktop
Booting up into the desktop presents you with essentially the same things you'll find
in the livecd, minus of course the extensive initial boot screen, and several icons on the
desktop. Other than that, both the livecd and the installed desktop are identical.
One of the first things you'll want to do once you get on the desktop though is to
update the system. There is a simple little icon of a box with a green arrow next to
your quick launch toolbar in the taskbar that will light up with a number under it,
indicating how many updates there are for you to do. Updates, just like new
software, are all handled by Synaptic. I'm actually very pleased to see Synaptic in
here because I consider it to be one of the better package management systems out there.
It's clean, quick and very simple to use and very intuitive for the new user.
Upgrading your system is actually quite remarkably quickly and easy. Just point,
click twice, and wait. The download of updates takes about 3-5 minutes on an average
high speed connection, or up to an hour on dialup Installation of the updated
packages is about another five minutes.
A quick check of hardware after installation shows that Mepis apparently sticks with
the default xorg open source drivers, rather than automatically installing the proprietary
Nvidia or ATI drivers. I'm sure this is more a moral choice than a technical choice,
but I did at least want to mention that. Given that the system is designed for new
users, I think it may scare off a few of the seasoned users due to its layout, but it will
definitely welcome in new users quite easily. If my mom can pick it up and use it
out of the box with little more instruction than "install it and tell me what you
think", then I would say that most users who are unfamiliar with Linux are pretty
safe using Mepis.
Looking around further I noticed that there is an included anti-virus program (It's got
clamav installed. No idea why it needs to be in there, since you really don't need
it, but it's there in case you want it anyways.) and it has "Guard Dog Firewall"
installed as well in case you want to run a firewall on your system. Now I do
recommend using a firewall even on a Linux system, not because Linux is vulnerable,
because it's not, or at least by default it's not. But there will be other
applications you'll use that will be vulnerable, so this is just a good preventative
measure.
Multimedia support is a bit hit and miss in general, and certainly isn't as plug and
play as I prefer when dealing with new users, but the ability to play movies and music is
there. Mplayer provides the backbone for playing DVD and movie files while Amarok
takes care of all your music playing needs. Interestingly enough, I found that
Amarok appears to be embedded into the system in some small degree, as there's icons for
it visible in several places in the system, including the Konqueror file manager. I
think the support for multimedia files and disks could be a lot better, but at least it's
not a total mess or worse yet, non existent. But users will have to display a degree
of patience when playing their DVD movies or music cd's.
Wireless support is decent overall. Some things are plug and play while others
take a bit of tinkering to get working. For users who hate tinkering, this will be a
show stopper for them, but if you don't mind a bit of playing under the hood, you can get
wireless working fairly easily. Removable media, as far as pen drives go, did not
work. I tried plugging them in, but Mepis wouldn't see them at all. Not even
diving into the console helped any. Now I'm not going to totally blame Mepis on this
as some of that may have been my hardware, but given that these pen drives have worked
under other distros before, I'm hesitant to believe it's my hardware.
Conclusion
Overall, SimplyMepis 7 is a very good distribution for new users. Aside from the
few problems I listed above, I'd consider it a top pick distribution for new users and
will join other greats such as PcLinuxOS and Mint on my list of recommended distributions.
It still has a few chinks in the armor that the developers still need to work out, but I
think that's true to some degree with every distribution, but some have bigger flaws than
others. There are some things that need to be fixed which I feel are important to
resolve in order for SimplyMepis to rise to the top of all distributions for new
users. But aside from that, it gets my vote as one of my recommended distributions.
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