Re: DEBIAN

[Tim McDonough <tim@mcdonough.net>]

Harold Crouch wrote:

> I've heard both good and bad things about Libranet, Ubuntu, Mepis,
> Xandros, blah, blah, blah.  I can't seem to remember ever hearing a
> single disparaging remark about Knoppix.  Maybe that's the way to go.
> 

Just earlier this week I received a MEPIS 3.3 CD. I don't consider 
myself either a Linux expert or a newbie but here's my impression...

It's the easiest distro I've installed out of Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, 
and Mandrake. MEPIS is Debian based. You run the live CD like Knoppix 
and if you like what you see the installer is one of the apps on the 
desktop. They give you much fewer choices than Fedora, etc. for apps to 
load at install time which in my opinion is good for someone just 
starting out. You end up with a basic workstation that has the usual 
utilities, Open Office, KDE stuff for email, file management, etc. plus 
FireFox for web surfing. Their package managers make it easy to find and 
grab other stuff.

The downside is MEPIS doesn't necessarily use all open source stuff. 
Maybe this doesn't bother you, maybe it does. The other thing I would 
have done different is to ask the user whether they wanted MEPIS or 
Windows to be the default in a dual-boot system. It defaults to MEPIS 
and you have to know which configuration file to go edit if you want 
something different. I think for a newcomer to Linux it's a very good 
candidate.

-- 
Tim McDonough
Springfield, IL

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