MEPIS basically claims to beat all other distributions at the major aspects of desktop-computing, as it claims to feature “unique hardware detection and configuration superior to any others” as well as being “pre-configured for simplicity and ease-of-use, you’re productive in a matter of minutes” and it claims to “include the very best business and multimedia programs”. Such huge claims gives huge expectations and that’s exactly how I intend to review this distribution: I expect nothing less than the perfect distribution, in all desktop-aspects - especially, as always, in the field of user-friendliness!

MEPIS is an Ubuntu-based distribution, using KDE for the desktop. It includes a vast array of free software (not just free as in open-source, but also closed-source free such as Skype). The first public release of MEPIS came in May 2003 and development has seemingly been going strong ever since.

The primary force behind the site is Warren Woodford, who founded the MEPIS Linux in November 2002, due to frustration of the several distributions he had tried and inspired by his experience as a NeXT developer, he began working on a distribution that “just works”. More developers have joined in later on.

The distribution was originally based directly on the Debian-tree, but has lately moved to use Ubuntu as its base. The distribution is free of charge and can be downloaded directly from one of the mirrors as a combo live-CD/install-CD.

It is possible to pay for a subscription, which gives access to special versions tailored for various purposes and to early test-releases. The fees primarily benefits paying for Warren’s full-time commitment to the development of the distribution.

Expectations
The distribution claims a lot so the stakes are high, but knowing of the main-developer’s past and his level of commitment, this distribution wants to be taken seriously, and that’s how I’ll review it. I expect nothing less of a setup from start to end with not a single loose end in any desktop-related field, be it multimedia, communication, web-browsing or linguistics.

Hardware
The hardware for this review was my own personal workstation. That I had to do actual work on this machine while having the OS installed only made it more significant for me that the system was capable of all the things I use Linux for.

This is the setup used in the review:

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+
• Harddrive (root, swap and home): 40 GB Maxtor 7200 rpm
• Harddrive: 2x 250 GB SATA-drives, running hardware RAID-0
• Graphic: NVidia GeForce 6600 GTX Dual-head
• Monitor: 2x 19″ Medion-monitors, one using DVI, other VGA
• Keyboard: Logitech Ultra-X
• Mouse: Logitech MX1000
• Optical drive: NEC DVD-RW ND-2510A
• TV-Tuner: Brooktree BT878-based

Getting the distribution
Getting it was no big deal. There where enough mirror-servers to choose from, all high-speed, although I find it peculiar that downloading via torrent was not an option, which probably would lead to less load on the mirrors, especially when a new version is released.

Official instructions on how to burn the ISO in various operating-systems were available, although the instructions were written in a very compact English, possibly not very helpful for the people who actually need these instructions the most. I found out much later that much better documentation were available on the site by looking in the official documentation-wiki, but how would any new visitor know that the same site contains ‘competing’ documentation spread around the site and under such confusing names as “MEPIS Community”?

Installation
You get plenty of options to choose from when the installation boots, but the defaults are in most cases just fine.

The distribution boots into a live-CD environment from which you can test out any aspect of MEPIS you might desire and install MEPIS whenever you’re ready.

At first boot you have to decide whether you want to log in as root or demo. You’re recommended to log in as demo, but it is tempting to log in as root, as you get the same features, but without the need to do a root-login each time you need to do some system-wide change, like when you want to start the installer. I personally don’t see why the CD cannot just log in as root per default, as I figure people either want to modify critical parts of their system using the live-CD or want to install the distribution, which in both cases requires root-password.

Starting the installer went well. All steps are very thoroughly described and the help-pane is discretely giving tips without interrupting the power-user. At the crucial parts, the parts involving partitioning, formatting and setting up mount-points, plenty of warnings were given.

I found a little bug and an annoyance during the installer. The bug was that even if you have a swap-partition, you have to pick it manually. I don’t see why it is not just automatically selected, as there’s no other purpose of a swap than being used.

The annoyance was the localization-part. I get to pick the keyboard and locale at the very end. Picking the right locale and the keyboard-layout wasn’t very intuitive, as the options were given only as short abbreviations for the respective countries names. This really need to be re-factored.

During installation, no package-selection is done, which means that all you can try using the live-CD, is installed. This also means that you are given no choice but to accept KDE as your desktop-environment, at least for now. As all focus in this distribution is on KDE, installing anything else is likely going to get you into trouble.

First boot
The system boots quite fast and I’m greeted, upon logging in, with a very clean desktop with a few icons and a centered task-bar. I guess the centered task-bar is to make the desktop feel more Mac OS X-ish, but it doesn’t do anything useful, so I quickly changed it to it’s full size so I could utilize it fully.

At my first log in, no special welcome-message appeared. This would’ve been nice for the new Linux-users, with a few good tips on where to start, what’s special in MEPIS and where to get help. Anyway, most is pretty self-explanatory if you have any background whatsoever in Windows or KDE.

I was a also a bit disappointed about the choice of time-format. It was am/pm and a little checking around in the system also revealed that I was using the imperial-system instead of the metric-system and letter-format instead of A4. I would’ve appreciated if all such stuff had been configured during installation.

Hardware
The MEPIS-website promises the distribution to contain “unique hardware detection and configuration superior to any others” so I would expect nothing less of all hardware to be correctly configured per default.

Most hardware was in fact properly set-up per default, like usually with any other Linux-distro, but superior? Well, the following things was not correctly detected/configured:

• Only detected one monitor. The superior distribution would’ve detected both, no? The resolution though, was detected correctly (1280×1024). To be fair, no distribution has ever detected both my monitors, but this could be expected from such “superior” detection.
• Cool’n'quiet: My CPU and motherboard supports Cool’n'quiet which makes the CPU down-clock itself when load is light which makes the CPU consume less power and thus generate less heat, but this was not configured per default. Most modern CPU’s support automatic down-clocking and it is pretty essential to have it set-up especially laptops, as lifetime on battery can be extended a lot by simply switching this feature on.
• My Logitech MX1000-mouse was just detected as a generic USB-mouse. Other distributions such as OpenSUSE correctly identified the mouse, which gives access to features like battery-monitoring from within KDE.
• No RAID. I had to manually install the hardware-RAID (using a little utility called dmraid). OpenSUSE also found and configured this.

Superior detection? No, but it did good.

A rather big annoyance is that internal hard-drives, besides the home, root and swap-partitions set up during installation, weren’t properly linked. They were detected though, but no links to them were provided anywhere, so this had to be done manually. In other words, to work with the other drives, either manually mounting them or making shortcuts to the devices had to be done.

Distribution specials
This distribution does come with a big array of special tools, not seen in any other distribution. Firstly is the installer and once installed, there are also the following available:

• MEPIS Network Assistant
  With this tool you can change all the basic network-settings, like your wireless LAN-information, and you can enable/disable the NDIS-wrapper, which by the way comes bundled with drivers for quite exotic networking-cards. NDIS-wrapper is a way to use binary Windows-drivers on Linux, a well-working method usually used for newer Windows-only devices for which there are no properly reverse-engineered or rewritten drivers available yet. In other words, you are likely to have luck using MEPIS wirelessly on bleeding-edge hardware, without having to manually mess with tricky unfriendly configuration-files.
• MEPIS System Assistant
  This tool has some repair-tools for resetting various configurations and backing up/synchronizing your system to a USB-stick, optionally using strong AES-encryption, which is definitely recommendable if you take your USB-stick around.
• MEPIS User Assistant
  This is basically just a tool to create and manage users. A point I love about this utility is that it’s not forcing the user to deal with group-relationships as it’s only the power-users who wants to create users that can’t shut down the computer or limit the users from listening to audio anyway, so let these power-users use whatever tools they like and let the desktop-users have it the easy, yet secure way. In this tool you just create and delete users and then all permissions and memberships are set automatically.
  I personally believe this approach to be both the easiest to work with and the most secure, as I believe good default are better than letting the user try and figure out what he or she needs.
• MEPIS X-Windows Assistant
  The tool I without doubt loves the most in MEPIS is this one. You can set up the mouse-driver, system-wide relative size of text (how many dpi fonts should be shown in) and you can install and configure the commercial nVidia and ATI-drivers for graphics cards. Options such as TwinView can be configured too, a feature I like a lot, as TwinView makes me able to join both my monitors virtually into one big desktop.

It should be noted that all of these tools that the documentation for them is either very lacking or doesn’t exist at all. The tools might seem pretty intuitive to casual users, but for the average user, picking between drivers for mouse, monitor and graphics card should really be well documented.

Productivity
OpenOffice.org is also bundled with this distribution. For supplying the lack of a calendar-application in the OpenOffice.org-suite, there’s Kontact. The OpenOffice.org-version is slightly outdated, but not by much.
OpenOffice.org has been set up nicely, themed exactly like all the other applications. File-associations in KDE are also working as expected, so the various document-formats such as the Microsoft Office-formats and OpenDocument-formats opens flawlessly in OpenOffice.org per default.

3D-desktop
3D-acceleration on the desktop seems to have become very popular lately, thus Beryl and Emerald are bundled with the distribution, along with loads of themes. Beryl and Emerald are tools for making-over your desktop into a 3D-desktop. The advantages of 3D-desktops is, besides of the eye-candy, that more graphical rendering is put on the graphics-adapter instead of the CPU, so if you have a decent graphics-card, using a 3D-desktop such as Beryl could speed up your desktop-experience. Beryl has an easy-to-use graphical configuration-front-end for setting up shortcuts and enabling, disabling and configuring special effects. Emerald, which is used for theming the window-borders, also has a very simple and easy-to-use front-end.

Packages and package-management
Installing new applications and removing unused applications is probably the most important set of tasks in a newly installed system. Most major distributions has more than one graphical package-manager, one for the new users with lots of descriptions and information about stuff like associated libraries and such are hidden, and a power-one (usually Synaptic) for maximum control. This is not totally the case in MEPIS. In MEPIS, there’s two, but none of which are particularly well organized and easy to use. This is sad, as the distribution so far has been almost flawlessly user-friendly.

On the positive side though, it should be mentioned that a very interesting repository called Medibuntu is included, but is deactivated per default though for legal reasons. It is very easy to activate it though, and doing so gives you access to interesting packages such as:

• w32codecs
  Almost full WMA9 and WMV9-support (DRM-support is missing).
• libdvdcss
  Without this you can’t play legally purchased DVD’s, but ironically any other DVD’s will work fine, yet it’s illegal to distribute this package in a Linux-distribution coming from the USA…
• Google Earth
  This is basically just wine and Google Earth for Windows, bundled. It works pretty well though.
• Opera
  Free alternative to Firefox, Konqueror and Internet Explorer (free, but not open-source).

Besides these non-free packages, MEPIS already has non-free packages such as Skype installed (please note: non-free in linux means the package does not have available source-code or source-code is in a non-open-source license, but it does mean the application costs money to obtain and use!) and as I noted earlier, installing the commercial nVidia and ATI-drivers are really just a snap. The thing about MEPIS is that it doesn’t limit itself like other distributions such as Ubuntu does, when it comes to any kind of not fully open-source drivers and applications. Some Linux-evangelists believe Linux and it’s applications should be fully open-source, but in practice, much simply cannot yet be done without the non-free packages.

Internet-browsers and plugins
The default browser in MEPIS is Mozilla Firefox. As MEPIS is a KDE-based distribution, KDE’s browser Konqueror is also around, but has been hidden deeply away in the Kicker (the KDE equivalent to the start-button and menu).

Browsing the web with Firefox in MEPIS is a breeze; everything just works! Flash 9 is bundled and mplayerplug-in is bundled. Mplayerplug-in makes it possible to view and listen to live-streams of video and audio, directly from websites. This makes it possible to view content such as high-definition trailers in QuickTime, radio-streams in MP3 and so on. If you installed w32codecs, you can enable the additional possible codecs for streaming by editing a configuration-file (click here and scroll to “To Get video streams working in firefox”). Unfortunately this is not done automatically and there’s no tool for doing so, but enabling this is really essential if you would like to view and/or listen to Windows Media-files. Once again, this not being enabled per default probably due to legal reasons.

Linking of file-extensions to the correct applications has mostly been done in Firefox, so Microsoft Office-documents, OpenDocument-documents and so on, will open in OpenOffice.org, PDF-files will open in KGhostView (a quite decent, but rather slow PDF-viewer, I recommend installing Acrobat Reader). This all works like a charm. I did find one lack though, which is DEB-files. DEB is the official package-format in MEPIS and thus it is strange that DEBs can’t be opened in Firefox. Instead they have to be saved and then you can install them by just clicking on them in KDE. This simple little lack I believe can be a showstopper for many a new MEPIS-user as installing packages directly from websites has just become one strange step longer.

Media-support and media-players
Per default, playing MP3 is possible as well as a load of other formats, free as well as and non-free. If you enabled the medibuntu-repository and installed libdvdcss, it is possible to play legally purchased DVD’s.

The media-support is very impressive compared to other distributions. A peculiar choice of media-player has been chosen - most KDE-distributions choose Kaffeine for media, but MEPIS has chosen Kmplayer. Kmplayer has support for both xine, mplayer and netscape-plugins (such as flash) so I guess in that sense, it’s the most compatible choice and as the UI’s of Kaffeine and Kmplayer are pretty similar, I guess Kmplayer is not a bad choice at all.

For organizing music, Amarok is installed.

File sharing
Now, sharing files between Linux and Windows shouldn’t really be a problem in any distribution. Samba, the protocol used in Windows for file-sharing is very old and is an open standard which has been very well implemented in Linux for very long. Even though, I have come across many distributions in which setting up file-sharing required much manual hacking, just for basic file-sharing. This is not the case in MEPIS though.

In MEPIS, your home-directory is automatically shared and secured by your local username and password. If you want to share additional directories you just have to right-click on some directory, choose “Properties” and click the “Share”-tab and after entering the root-password, you can add additional directories for file-sharing. Any new users you create have a special folder in their home-directory shared per default.

I tried accessing the shared folders from Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X. From all of these systems, I didn’t have any issues whatsoever. The host-name of my computer resolved nicely in all of them, I could log in and the encoding of the file-names were correct (special danish characters were rendered like they should). I also tried sharing folders in which my user didn’t have permission to do anything and the permissions were upheld - I couldn’t do anything in these folders like expected.

The same was the case the other way around. I could easily access shared folders hosted on the Vista, the XP and the OS X.

Documentation
To give the new user a bad start, there’s an outdated and very small documentation linked to everywhere on the main site and then there’s the wiki which is in most parts fully up-to-date and in a much higher quality, but getting to the wiki requires the the visitor to guess/randomly follow all links and find out that ‘MEPIS Community’ actually means ‘wiki’ - this could’ve been done so much smarter! I have no idea why the original documentation has not been relinked to the wiki, as everything is in the wiki anyways and for what I checked, the quality was much higher in the wiki. The wiki has instructions guiding you through all aspects of downloading and installing MEPIS as well as instructions for setting up and getting started for most applications you’re likely to come across.

The wiki is quite comprehensive, but the documentation and wiki for Ubuntu/Kubuntu covers more and as Ubuntu and MEPIS shares repositories, the Ubuntu-documentation is often a good place to look if you’re exploring a topic not yet discovered in the MEPIS-documentation.

Localization
This is the one field where SimplyMEPIS is lacking behind a lot! Per default everything is set up as if you’re an American. You have to manually, post-installation, set up time-zone, download the correct spell-checking packages, localization-files, help-files for all applications which has such, and of course configure it all as well as re-configuring all the applications you already have installed - no tools whatsoever, besides the standard KDE-tools, are there to assist you. In other words, it’s a big task, which I don’t believe anybody can complete, to convert the system into the users local language. Even worse, there’s near to none documentation on how to change language, not even in the wiki. The screen-shot to the right shows ALL the documentation available, at the time of the article, on how to change localization.

Compare this situation to Ubuntu, in which a tool is bundled from which other languages can be picked and by using this tool, Ubuntu automatically downloads all necessary localization-packages and configures them accordingly.

Conclusion
SimplyMEPIS is probably the best work- and multimedia-oriented distribution I’ve tried. Commercial applications such as Skype are installed per default, Firefox is the default browser, mplayer is installed per default and is nicely integrated into Firefox, so multimedia from websites for most parts just works, and setting up and using additional repositories for additional multimedia-applications, such as w32codecs (for WMA9 and WMV9) and libdvdcss (for playing copy-protected DVD’s), is a snap. An NDIS-wrapper for wireless network-cards is bundled and configured nicely per default, which means that a much bigger array of wireless networkcards should work, than in the open-source-only distributions, such as OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.

MEPIS is based on Ubuntu and uses KDE as its default desktop-environment, but be not fooled that this is just another Kubuntu: MEPIS also features unique tools for specific administrative tasks not seen anywhere else. For instance, the MEPIS User Assistant doesn’t just create users, but also sets up file-sharing for the given users and the MEPIS X-Windows Assistant doesn’t just change resolution of the monitor, but also installs commercial nVidia/ATI-drivers and enables multi-monitor support and so on from an easy-to-use user interface.

MEPIS lacks behind in only a few cases, but that is in some rather crucial ones. Firstly, the website is hard to navigate through, as important parts, such as documentation, has been given very odd names - this is not the way to attract new users! That said, the documentation-wiki is very good.

Then there’s localization… Or rather, not localization. There’s no tool for doing the couple of tedious tasks required to change the localization and thus, unless you’re an advanced user, you’re system will think you’re american and treat you accordingly.

All in all, MEPIS will get you going in no time, regardless what desktop-oriented task you want to do. The Ubuntu-base gives you access to a huge array of well-working applications.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Distributions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.