Finally left gentoo...for MEPIS?!?

[mengle]

I'd been a faithful gentoo user for almost a year. Man I couldn't get away from emerge. What a great package management system. However, there are so many things I never did get working quite right but I sort of put up with it.

After having some problems making a new kernel (I never was very good at making my own kernels) I ended up with a system with no X-windows. Finally, I'd had it. I really loved a lot about gentoo but I just didn't have time to fix things with it anymore. Thank god for Knoppix, I was able to get all of my data burned onto CDs for the move.

But then the most daunting of all linux questions came up...which distro should I try next. I never really fell in love with Mandrake or Red Hat and had run into RPM dependency hell more than once so SuSE was also out. And I'd never installed debian but heard it was at least a fair amount of work to install but I'd heard great thing about apt-get. But I was really too tired and upset to actually have to think about installation.

So I finally decided I was looking for a easy-to-install debian-based distro. There sure are plenty of them (Xandros, Lycoris, Lindows, etc.). I also wanted to have fairly new packages rather than super stable but slightly older packages. So after thinking back to discussions on these forums I remembered MEPIS (with lots of positive comments by JohnT and MMYoung).

After a quick 10 minute installation I had a running MEPIS system with the 2.6.7 kernel, KDE 3.2 (which will take a while to get used to after my many months of fluxbox), a nice looking open office 1.1.2, and most other things I'd need. The most amzing thing is it seems to run as fast as gentoo did, which is a little shocking.

The most important change is all of the little things that now work on my computer. The zip drive I never got around to putting in fstab. My USB now mounts in 2.6 (never got that working right in 2.6). etc etc. Yeah some might see me as lazy for not getting around to these things but it's a huge load off to not have to even think about these things now.

I'll try to keep everyone posted on my honest opinion of MEPIS but so far so good.

[bufferman]

how is package installation in MEPIS?

[madcompnerd]

I didn't like Mepis, I installed it on a friends machine. But yea, gentoo isn't that much quicker, only obsessive people will notice native code over i386 stuff with a native kernel. And I don't think they can really tell, they just think they can.
I run Arch :), and it's all about the package manager.

[mengle]

Originally posted by bufferman
how is package installation in MEPIS?

You mean the package manager?

AFAIK It's identical to debian. I use synaptic to run updates and install/unistall packages. It's painless and much faster than compiling from source code (upgrading version of KDE and openoffice took FOREVER.

If you mean the packages that come installed with the distro, I'm impressed. Everything is up to date. I also haven't run into 5 of ever tool you need like Mandrake and Redhat have (e.g., Abiword and koffice, and openoffice vs. only openoffice). I much prefer having a scaled-down set of programs installed with the distro but that's definitely a personal preference.

[habibbijan]

Mepis is based on Debian, so it uses Apt to install new packages, like Mengle said.

I like Gentoo a lot, but I wouldn't pick it if I had to get a system running fairly quickly. Mepis is great because of how quickly it loads and installs to disk.

I think I remember reading that Mepis had problems with breaking packages if you ran apt-get upgrade (at least on the 2003-10 version). Did anyone have that problem, and if so, is this still a problem with SimplyMepis?

[MMYoung]

Originally posted by bufferman
how is package installation in MEPIS?
It's Debian based so you can use apt-get, or KPackage/Synaptic as gui frontends for apt-get.

To be honest with you, I think MEPIS is the best "newbie" distro out there, IMHO. It's has a pretty straight forward install, you can even use QTParted to partition your drive. It has OpenOffice and all the Kthis and Kthat with the KDE Desktop, even installs K3B. Matter of fact "they" are writing a book entitled "Point and Click Linux" and MEPIS is the distro they are using. For me it was much easier to install than either Mandrake or FC 2 and it didn't take near a long to finish up. I've given the SimplyMEPIS Live CD to several people that want to try Linux out without having to go through the "hassle" of installing it first. Personally, I just kind of "out-grew" it and switched over to Slackware. That and I like the GNOME desktop better than KDE (at least for now) and GNOME is a *witch* to install on MEPIS. It can be done, just takes a bit to do it.

And Mengle, don't worry about being called "lazy", whatever works for you is the best distro for you. That's the great thing about Linux, choice. If the truth be told I started to install MEPIS when Slackware started using udev, but I've got too much invested in my Slack so I'm sticking it out (again at least for now ;)).

Later,
MMYoung

[MMYoung]

Originally posted by habibbijan
I think I remember reading that Mepis had problems with breaking packages if you ran apt-get upgrade (at least on the 2003-10 version). Did anyone have that problem, and if so, is this still a problem with SimplyMepis?
There were some on the MEPIS forums that had that problem but I never did have any problems, other than just simple crap that I should've known better, ie unmutting the volumes in ALSA. I even installed ALSA from source, rather than update via apt-get (via KPackage). The only problem I had was the upgrade from KDE 3.1.4 to 3.2, that was the killer for me and what made me switch to Slackware. From what I've read on the MEPIS forums those problems have been "taken care of" (at least until the upgrade to 3.3).

There *should* be another release of MEPIS that will be called either ProMEPIS or just MEPIS 2004.1. I have played around with the beta and it doesn't install all the services (like the Guarddog Firewall) and I *believe* you will have more control over the partitions as well. Again this is from memory, and I don't remember near as good as I used to, so as the saying goes "don't quote me on that".

Later,
MMYoung

[mengle]

Hmmm..well it looks like I ran into my first major issue with MEPIS (or rather Debian).

I want to install Labplot but it needs an older version of of a lib file than the one I currently use. When I try to install the older version of the file it wants to remove the newer version and thus break all the packaegs that use that file as a dependency.

So it seems like you can only have 1 version of every file or library or whatever in debian, and thus can't use packages that require different versions of the same llibrary. This feels a lot like rpm hell in a way. This wasn't a problem with gentoo but I still am not willing to go back to gentoo so I guess I'm still searching for another distro. :(

Is anyone aware of a distro that's easy to install and generally operate (no more screwing around with config files regularly) that doesn't have this problem? Does this distro even exist?

I'm all ears.