| SimplyMEPIS 3.4-3 finally goes gold |
Feb. 10, 2006
The SimplyMEPIS 3.4-3 has finally been released, MEPIS creator and lead developer Warren Woodford said Thursday. Any further changes will be made available as updates from the MEPIS pool. SimplyMEPIS is a LiveCD distribution that also enables users to install the OS to boot and run from their hard drives.
The more than 900 packages preinstalled in Debian-based SimplyMEPIS 3.4-3 include Xorg 6.8, KDE 3.4.3, OpenOffice 2.0.1, Firefox 1.5, and a 2.6.15 Linux kernel. SimplyMEPIS is multimedia-ready with integrated players for all major media types, Woodford said. For example, Macintosh and PC iPods should work seamlessly with Amarok, he added.
Hardware detection and configuration are now handled within the kernel and with the aid of the dbus/hal/udev/pmount suite of apps, eliminating most of the old functionality. These new technologies have the potential to greatly improve the user experience by improving the integration of hardware with Linux, Woodford said.
Unfortunately, he said, some Linux applications are not yet "udev aware," and this caused some unexpected challenges for MEPIS during the development cycle. Most of these problems were solved by using alternate packages or by custom configuration of the existing packages, he added.
"I know that the community has been anxious for this release and may wonder why it has taken so long. Several times we thought we were ready and then another application released or another problem showed up," Woodford said. "This is partially because we are dealing with new technologies developed by others. We don't have any control of their development or QA cycles. But it's also because we haven't had the resources to involve the community early on in our test cycle.
"We plan to change that for the next release, so more people will have the opportunity to participate in the process. We've already run some pools at MEPIS.org to get input from the community, and soon I will start a blog where I answer questions from the community, explain what MEPIS is doing, share my experience, and give my opinions."
"SimplyMEPIS used to be built on packages from the Debian unstable (Sid) pool, and that worked well because the Debian pool changed slowly," Woodford said. "Then the rate change increased in Sid, and for this release we switched to Debian testing (Etch). But even Etch is becoming too unstable for our users' needs; it took months of extra work to get this release out the door. We'll have to find a different solution for the future."
Woodford said he did not to imply that there is anything wrong with Etch or Debian -- quite the contrary, he said.
"The Debian team is working very hard to build the next stable version of Debian. But they have no obligation or reason to consider our needs for a package pool that is stable on a 6 month cycle," Woodford added
Availability
SimplyMEPIS is available as a free download from public Linux mirrors. Look for MEPIS v3.4-3 in the released subdirectory at the MEPIS subscriber's site and public mirrors.
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