My First Look At Mepis 7 Beta 5

by ComputerBob

October 14, 2007

Last night, I finally downloaded and burned a CD of Beta 5 — the first Mepis 7 beta that I've tried.

I'm using it right now from the LiveCD to post this forum message.

Before I booted the LiveCD, I removed both of the hard drives from My Hardware-Based Dual-Boot PC. My PC has an Athlon XP 2100+ with 1 GB of RAM, an nVidia GeForce 6200 video card, and an Envision G22LWK 22" wide-screen LCD monitor.

At the startup screen, I chose 60 MHz and 1680 x1050 resolution. I got both with no problems.

After I logged in as username "demo" the KDE desktop came up correctly, the startup music played, but an error window popped up saying: The application KDesktop (kdesktop) crashed and caused the signal 6 (SIGABRT)...

I clicked on the Backtrace tab, but it told me that it couldn't run backtrace and gave me a "broken glass" sound.

Strangely, those errors didn't seem to affect anything, though, since the KDE desktop is still running, and everything in it appears to be working just fine. To me, the Beta 5 desktop looks pretty much just like a stock Mepis 6.5 desktop. I can see where some people could be disappointed in that, and would want the new Mepis to have a new look, but to me, the eye candy is not important, since I can easily change it to look the way I want anyway.

I opened a console window and typed dmesg, but the word "error" didn't appear anywhere in it. I wonder if the "KDE crash" could have been related to the fact that I'm running without any hard drives installed right now, since I haven't seen anyone else report that "KDE crash" error.

My DSL connection was automatically detected and I got online with Firefox without having to configure anything.

All fonts look too small, and the bold-faced ones are blurry (or maybe "lumpy.") I can backspace OK, but if I use the forward or back arrow keys to move around this message as I type it, the insertion point leaves a weird-looking, slightly angled, split vertical bar at each character as it moves across the line of text. The weird bars disappear as soon as I type a new character or space. I'm sure it's some sort of nVidia problem, since apparently the LiveCD is using the older nv driver. I hope the problem would be corrected if I were to install the beta to a hard drive and install the newer nVidia driver, but it's sure making it difficult to edit what I'm writing right now.

I successfully opened several apps, including OpenOffice.org Writer, K3b, Kontact, Synaptic (of course Synaptic gave a startup error because it can't write to /var/cache/apt/ on the LiveCD). I also went to YouTube and played a video with sound without any problems. I even ran Planet Penguin Racer for several seconds. It ran really slowly and the video was really choppy, but that's to be expected since it's not installed on a hard drive, and as I mentioned above, the LiveCD is apparently running the old "nv" video driver instead of the newer "nvidia" one.

With all the of speculation about whatever's going on with Warren (main developer Warren Woodford) that's keeping him from working on Mepis except on weekends, and all of the problems that have been reported with the Mepis 7 beta, even for this newest one, I've been a little worried about whether Mepis 7 was going to work for me, or whether I should maybe "cast off my Mepis training wheels" and try using straight Debian Etch itself. But right now, running Beta 5, even with the few problems that I'm experiencing in it, I'm feeling a whole lot more confident that Mepis 7 is eventually going to work just fine for me.