[NBLUG/talk] Mepis mini-mini review

[Troy Arnold]

Anyone looking for a pretty painless (and amazingly quick) way to get
Debian onto a machine should check out Mepis: http://www.mepis.org/

Yesterday, we installed a recent copy onto a friends machine and it was
pretty damn amazing.

1) boot the live cd
2) Click the 'install me' link
3) If you want, let it auto-partition
4) add your username
4) Wait a few minutes
5) log into your new kde desktop

I think it was about 15-20 mins start to finish on a 2ghz P4, 7200rpm
drive.

I like that the apt sources.list file consists solely of Debian
testing/unstable and a Mepis source.  Remove that mepis source, aptitude
update; aptitude dist-upgrade and you have a nice Debian box.  This will
break the Mepis-specific tools like 'OsCenter' but in my opinion that
wasn't a great tool anyway.

I also liked the fact that when doing the dist-upgrade, I was asked very
few questions about config files (meaning, Mepis doesn't change much
from stock Debian)

What I did not like was that samba and apache both came up listening on
an unfirewalled interface.  

One last nice thing that I like about Mepis is that it is configured with a
clean, pleasant desktop and is all-in-all not as flashy as Knoppix.

-troy