A Look at MEPIS 3.3

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

March 9, 2005

MEPIS is a distribution that hails from West Virginia, USA and is developed by Warren Woodford. MEPIS can either be used as a live-cd system (one that boots from your CD drive, no need for installation) or it can be installed. I decided to try my luck at installation, so this review also doubles as an install guide for MEPIS

I should point out that my test system isn't fresh out of the showroom. It's a five-year-old AMD K6-II. Despite its age, it isn't short on memory. I just popped in another 128 MBs to add to the 256 it already had. It's not top-of-the-line, but it's not particularly challenged. So, if you've got something like this in your home or business and you don't know what to do with it, then you can use it to test MEPIS (or any other Linux distribution in this series). Everything I've tried runs at a fairly acceptable speed.

First, when I loaded MEPIS from the CD, in order to get something to appear on my screen, I had to make sure some options got passed at boot time. On other machines I tried, I could just choose one of the default boot options, so it doesn't mean you have to look at some boot options you might not understand. But if you're having problems seeing something on your screen, first choose your kernel (I went with 2.4 to be safe) and then use the backspace button and erase the default boot options and add something like:

vga=normal xdrvr=vesa

You can also press F1 to see other options. If you've got special language and/or keyboard requirements, then press F2 and choose the appropriate language here. For example, where I live, I need a Spanish keyboard layout, even though I prefer everything to appear in English.

Now that you've chosen your language options if that applies, your kernel and you've added any boot options below, you're ready to go.

MEPIS found all the hardware on this machine quite nicely. It's all pretty standard anyway. It has a Soundblaster Audio PCI64, a video camera card that uses the BTTV driver, a clone of a RealTek network card that uses the Nek2k-pci driver. It's also got an LG CD-RW drive, in addition to its normal CD-R drive. All of this was found and supported nicely. In no time the system was up and running off of the CD.

Install Me!

Once you're running off of the CD, take a few minutes to get a feel for the system. Once you feel you've seen enough, there is an icon on the left side of your screen that says 'Install me'. Click it to let the fun begin!

First of all, let me just say that I am a big fan of partitioning the hard drive. Now I'm sure that there are a lot of people out there for whom this 'partitioning' stuff is meaningless or at worse frightening. Don't worry. I am a former English and history teacher, so I was once a frightened soul as well. If you're not too keen on dividing up your hard disk like a pie, then at this point you can choose the 'Auto install using the entire disk' option.

If you're feeling a bit adventurous, then I'd recommend you try out a little partitioning. What I advise is splitting the hard disk in two parts. Click on the button 'Run QT Parted' to start this process. If you have existing partitions, remove them until you have all free space. Then create your first partition with at least 3 GB of space. Then create a partition with the remaining space *minus* the amount of your machine's RAM. This last amount free space will be your 'swap' partition. It's still a good idea to have swap, although this practice comes from the days when large amounts of RAM was not common. A 'swap' partition exists to give the machine a little virtual memory boost. You can add more swap if you like. Some people prefer a size that's the equivalent of double the RAM. The first partition you created is where we'll put our root / partition. The second partition will be /home, which is where all of the user files are kept. The last one, as you already know, is for the swap partition. Keeping /home in its own partition has a few advantages. One is partial protection in case of hard disk failure. Your /home partition stands a greater chance at remaining unscathed. Also, if you update or even change your Linux distribution, you can keep your /home partition where it is, eliminating the need to be copying files and restoring them after the install (this doesn't mean that you shouldn't make regular backups, of course). Also, it's best to format these partitions with what's known as a 'journaling' file system like 'ext3' or 'reiserfs'. Without getting into too much detail, these file systems are better at keeping your data that the older standard Linux filesystem format 'ext2'. Your hard disk should end up looking like the following screen shot:

Continuing with the install, you can have the tool check for bad blocks on the hard drive. You will notice there is an option to preserve data in /home. This is what I mentioned before. Now it will ask you if it's OK to destroy your data. That's just fine. Let the destruction begin.

As MEPIS is installing, you'll get some nice messages from the developer, Warren Woodford. One of the messages you'll see is that MEPIS is based on Debian unstable. Don't let that word scare you. Debian is so polished and conservative with their versions that the current *stable* version is from 2002. In other words, Debian is the William F. Buckley of Linux distributions. All of these messages contain important information. One of them talks about KPPP, a program to configure your internet connection if you're on dial-up. Another talks about the installation of fonts, which is an important topic for both aspiring and accomplished graphic artists.

Next, you'll come to a dialog that asks you to choose your boot method. A program with an ugly name (Grub) will allow you to boot more than one operating system. The safest option is to choose to install it into the MBR or 'Master Boot Record'. This is a reserved space on your hard drive. You can also choose if you want a graphical or text screen for Grub on boot. Next, you'll have to select which kernel to boot. Two major versions of the kernel, the core of your operating system (it makes the hardware and software work together) come with MEPIS. These are 2.4 and 2.6. The more recent one has the larger number. I found on this test system that 2.4 is much more friendly with it. Here though, you can choose both and then at boot time you can choose the kernel that seems to work better.

Next, you'll need to create at least one user account. Linux is a multi-user system and along with one or more normal user accounts you also have the system administrator account. This is known as 'root'. This is only used for system maintenance. You have to choose a password for 'root' here as well.

Now that we're choosing, you'll need to choose a name for your computer. This can be harry, sam - gepetto - whatever you like. You will also see that MEPIS comes with a program called Samba. This isn't about exotic dancing. This program allows Windows machines to access your computer as if it were a Windows network share. If you have a home or office network with Windows machines, these machines can easily access your Linux machine to store files on it. If you want this, you'll also have to choose a name for your system. I just went with the same name I had chosen before.

You'll need to select some services that will start at boot. These include a firewall, which is a good idea. The others depend on what you have (ISDN, for example, is not too common anymore).

You'll have to set your localization settings to reflect where you're living and the kind of language requirements you have. You can also take the opportunity to set your clock to your local time.

Now it's time to reboot and try out MEPIS.

Enjoy Your New System

Now you should be nicely logged into your new MEPIS system. Take a few minutes to look around - to kick the tires, as they say. There's a lot here to see and to use.

Anybody who is familiar with MS Windows (what's that, 90% of the population?) shouldn't be too confused by what he or she is looking at. In fact, Linux has come a long way in the almost 8 years that I've been using it. You may have heard the nasty rumors that you need to learn arcane command line routines from the *old* days of computing. This is, as I said, just a nasty rumor. If you click on the little house icon - the one with the red roof - you can move your files, even send them across the world - just by dragging and dropping. Yes, that same drag and drop found in that *other* operating system.

MEPIS comes with OpenOffice.org, a full-featured office suite. And this suite is sweet. You can Open most files produced with MS Office and you can create files so that your MS Office using pals can open them (or you can convince them to switch to OpenOffice, which is also available for Windows).

One of the big attractions that MEPIS has for me is how it's integrated support for audio and video over the web. This has been (and I think in most Linux distributions still is) a problem for Linux. MEPIS has pretty much solved it. The screen shot below shows Firefox loading the Mplayer plug-in to play a Windows Media file. Since RealVideo most Quicktime codecs are also supported, MEPIS provides you to see nearly anything streamed over the web.

As you can see, MEPIS proves what we Linux advocates have been saying for quite some time. There shouldn't be anything stopping you from adopting Linux. Linux can do it all.

Getting More Stuff

If there isn't enough for you, we can get some newstuff via a program called 'Synaptic'

You can use the 'search' feature to look for packages that you want to install. As you can see here, I got a couple of programs that I use frequently:

Synaptic will also help you keep your system up to date with the latest bug fixes and security enhancements.

Conclusion

If I were starting out with Linux today, I'd definitely give MEPIS a try. Start out by booting it and just using it as a live CD. If you like it, then you can install it. MEPIS can also be purchased from the online store at the website. Buying MEPIS will ensure that development will continue on this top-notch up and coming Linux distribution.

Michael J. Jordan is the webmaster of Linux Online. He can be reached at Michael.Jordan**AT**Linux.org