| MEPIS ships v6.0 RC3, delays final pending license audit |
Jul. 11, 2006
MEPIS founder and chief maintainer Warren Woodford on July 10 announced the availability of the third release candidate of SimplyMEPIS 6.0. Woodford also announced that due to a license audit, the final SimplyMEPIS 6.0 bootable CD has been rescheduled for release around July 18.
"MEPIS is reviewing the licensing rights and obligations associated with the packages available in SimplyMEPIS," Woodford said. "This has resulted in some changes and a delay in the shipment of 6.0."
As a result, lame and liblame0 are being withheld from the final SimplyMEPIS 6.0, Woodford said.
"We are in the process of making sure that 6.0 will be in compliance with the GPL and other licenses," Woodford said. "It appears that the lame source code is originally licensed under the GPL and the LGPL. But Lame incorporates algorithms that could to be subject to patent claims and licensing fees."
"It is my understanding that the GPLv2 license is incompatible with software that is subject to licensing fees, and therefore it is not legal under the GPLv2 for us to download the source code or distribute binaries of lame," Woodford added.
RC3 contains additional bug fixes, several of which were contributed by the community, Woodford said.
New improvements, according to Woodford, include: - The display layout of the "settings" kioslave has been tweaked in response to tester feedback.
- The RT2400 and RT2500 wireless tools have been added to settings.
- Khotkeys now works with settings in KDE 3.5.3
- For better integration with KDE, MEPIS has been removing utilities from the MEPIS OS Center and rewriting them so they can be placed in appropriate categories in settings. The MEPIS Installer is now a separate application.
- To improve the functionality of the utilities and to be more compatible with future releases of KDE and MEPIS, new utilities are being built with QT 4.1.
- At user requests, ocrad and gocr OCR software was added to the bootable CD. OpenOffice hyphenation and help were also added.
- Enigmail was added for Thunderbird.
- Cups configuration was tweaked to eliminate some printer sharing problems that had been introduced by the upgrade to KDE 3.5.3.
- The Samba default configuration was tweaked and tested to work seamlessly in a mixed open network of MEPIS, XP, Win2k, and OSX machines.
The version 6.0 release candidate 3 iso image is available for download and testing in the MEPIS "testing" subdirectory at the MEPIS subscriber's site and on public mirrors. For up to seven days, beta testers are requested to send feedback to dev@mepis.org.
DesktopLinux.com's resident Linux test pilot, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, recently took MEPIS 6.0 for a spin and was quite impressed with it. "The final version is due out [on July 18], but I can already recommend MEPIS 6.0 today," he wrote.
Find out exactly why our crusty curmudgeon is so enamored with MEPIS 6.0, by reading his first-impressions review:
A first look at MEPIS's new Ubuntu-based Linux
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