Ok, since I recommended Mepis in another thread and had downloaded a copy of their latest release 3.4.3 a few days ago, I decided to burn the ISO and give it a quick lookover.

About Mepis

Mepis is one of the better known small live CD Linux distributions oriented towards desktops. While it doesn't have any big corporate names behind it, it has garnered quite a reputation for being one of the more hassle free and complete distros for the desktop user. The ISO is freely downloadable but to get high priority access to its servers, you need a subscription. A small list of free mirrors are provided as well on its website and once out in the wild, torrents are easily downloadable from Linux Tracker.

One of its differentiating factors is the fact that, unlike other free-download distros, it packages a number of popular but license-encumbered libraries and executables inside the distro. While the legality of this act is debatable and I'm pretty sure RMS would have nothing nice to say about it, the end result is users are spared the hassle of hunting around forums and IRC channels looking for ways to play mp3s.

About the review

I'm only taking a quick look-see into the overall capabilities of this release. As it's a live CD, all I did was to pop in the CD, booted up and take a quick test of it's applicatoins and features. I did not install it to my harddisk. However, as the purpose of the live CD is to act as a proof-of-concept that the distro would install on your PC without hitches, you can take this as a general indication that what I found running the live CD would be the same if you installed it on your hard drive.

Hardware

Testing was done on a white box PC with the following specifications:

CPU: P4 2.4GHz
Mainboard: Biostar U8668-D
RAM: 256MB 333MHz
Video: Integrated
Audio: Integrated
CD-ROM drive: Samsung 52X
DVD-R/RW drive: Lite-on
Speakers: Generic stereo
Printer: HP Officejet 4255 AIO with fax/scanner/print capabilities

Bootup

Upon booting up, I was presented with the GRUB interface. With a few options for normal, video-impaired, debugging and for generally slower PCs, I chose the normal bootup. A basic splash screen was shown as it went through the bootup process. As this is a live CD bootup, speed wasn't impressive but you can expect serious improvements if you install it to the hard drive. As it is now, on my machine, it took 2 minutes and 8 seconds from when I made my Grub selection till I saw the login screen. The login screen itself is simple: a list of accounts are displayed and you choose one of the accounts by clicking on it and entering your password. For this test, I entered the root account (not a good thing to do on a regular basis!)

Inside Mepis

Upon logging in, I noticed that the KWeather weather report plugin at the bottom of the screen updated itself immediately. This shows that my network card was detected and configured successfully as I needed network access to get the weather information. Out of my speakers came a nice welcome tune so that means the integrated sound card was detected successfully as well, unlike SuSE Linux 10 which had perpetual problems with my soundcard.

Mepis uses KDE, which is one of the 2 window environments reigning supreme right now. The version used is 3.4 though, which is one step behind the latest release. A quick look through the K Menu yielded no surprises:

1) A bunch of basic arcade, board, card and strategy games ubiquitious throughout most distros.
2) Graphic tools
3) Internet applications
4) Media applications
5) OpenOffice
6) System and utility tools

The version of OpenOffice used is 2.0.1 so that's updated enough. Maybe in a couple of years KOffice would be matured enough to take its place as I'm really not a fan of OpenOffice and its lack of performance. The slowness becomes even more pronounced when you run it as a live CD.

I mounted a network share using the Konqueror file manager by typing "smb://username@network-address". Browsing through network shares was no problem as was always the case. Having said that, you'll see later that playing media files over the network can sometimes pose problems.

The file manager supports multi-tabs like Firefox and also functions as a web browser. Personally, I've always preferred the rendering performance of Konqueror's KHTML versus Firefox's Gecko. Firefox is included as the standard web browser though, as is Thunderbird along with KDE's own Kontact. Browsing the web was no problem and I also managed to download a few mail from a test account using all the mentioned applications.

It was puzzling though that Mepis didn't seem to come with the standard KDE IM client Kopete while Skype was included.

The 3.3.X Mepis family used to come with Adobe Acrobat Reader to view PDF files. However, since the native KDE PDF viewer KPDF has matured significantly since then, Acrobat Reader was left out. This is a good move in my opinion, as PDF files can be viewed inside the Konqueror window thanks to KDE's embedded KPart technology.

I ran the live CD on a PC with some NTFS drives on it. The drives were not mounted automatically and I had to mount it by issueing the "mount /dev/<partition-name> /mnt/<mount-point>" command and the command line. This may have been a fail-safe move as write operations for NTFS file systems are not well-supported in Linux. I had no way of verifying if a FAT or native Linux file system would be auto-mounted.

Having established that all the usual applications are intact, I proceeded to try out opening some documents and media files. Opening office documents would be the same using OpenOffice on any operating system so I will not go into that here. Instead, I concentrated more on opening media files and testing if they played properly. The list of file formats tested and their results goes as follows:

1) MP3 files - no problems
2) WMV files - no problems
3) ASX files - no problems
4) AVI files - no problems
5) MPG files - no problems
6) OGM files - no problems, I was testing a file with dual audio and subtitles and I could toggle between all of them easily using the KDE media player Kaffeine
7) Matroska files - I could only open the audio and subtitle streams but not the video stream. However, as Matroska is a container format, I'm not sure what video stream was inside that I couldn't open

In any case, this proves that media files in general are no challenge for Mepis and it would satisfy the needs of most users. However, all the files above were only successfully played on my NTFS mount. When I attempted to play the files over a network share, it not only threw an error but gave an erronous error message at that, claiming that the relevant decoding libraries couldn't be found when in actual fact I had all the required libraries.

To my disappointment though, I found that my HP AIO printer couldn't be detected. I ventured no more than this as this is just supposed to be a cursory look through the default capabilities of Mepis. So I removed the printer's USB cable and stuck in a thumbdrive instead. Ah, much better. The thumbdrive was detected and an icon to access it was placed on the desktop Mac-style.

Lastly, I attempted to burn a CD-R using KDE's K3B. I selected the ISO file for the very same Mepis that I'm reviewing right now and the entire burn process went without a hitch. So now I have TWO copies of Mepis 3.4.3. Not exactly smart of me.

In conclusion

I was extremely happy with my installation of Mepis 3.3.1 about a year and a half ago and I'm happy to say that the sentiment remains. Barring a few niggling issues and a slightly bigger one in the printer (which I'm sure can be solved as I've managed to get the printer working under OpenSuSE), Mepis remains one of the most complete basic desktop distros in the market.

This post has been edited by lilwong: Feb 18 2006, 04:53 PM

As mentioned, I now have 2 copies of Mepis 3.4.3 in my hands. As I won't be using it, one of you people may have it. I live in Jln Ipoh, KL and work at the Celcom building in Jln Semarak. First person who PMs me and doesn't need me to travel halfway round the city for it gets it.

This post has been edited by lilwong: Feb 18 2006, 05:02 PM