Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Mepuntu: Mepis 6.0 Alpha 1

Filed under
Linux
Reviews
-s

Yesterday Mepis announced the alpha1 release of SimplyMEPIS 6.0. This is the first release publically available for Mepis after integrating some Ubuntu components into their system. As with many alphas, there wasn't enough changed from the last stable release to cause massive instability. There were just a few changes and new goodies in store for the user in this release. Tuxmachines downloaded and installed it last night. What did we find?

The release was the familiar installable livecd, the grub screen and boot splash hadn't changed much since last release. It still offered the same options as previous as well. If you'll recall the blue colored theme running throughout.

        

KDE in this alpha was 3.5.2. It fast and complete. The Mepis announcement stated that "some of the Kmenus have been rearranged to take advantage of metadata embedded in the kde shortcut files." I'm not sure I see much difference in them really yet.

        

The panel/kicker seem less busy with many of its previous icons now removed. I recall this was one of MadPenguins complaints when they reviewed Mepis 3.4.3, although the announcement stated this was done at the urging of the community. Now instead of the 6 icon cluster on the launcher, we now have one icon that opens a menu to some of the system tools. I liked the little icon cluster. It gave Mepis a slightly different look than most other distro's default kde. They did leave the kaquarium deal. The system tray has icons for connection status, ksensors, mixer, kdisk, and klipper, as well as a large kweather icon.

The harddrive installer is integrated into the Mepis OSCenter on the livecd and after install it automagically disappears. This is a really nice disappearing act. After install, what's left is some deeper system-wide configurations such as network interfaces, User Accounts, and Repair Partitions. Warren Woodford stated that "We plan to breakout components in the MEPIS OSCenter into KParts that can be integrated into SystemSettings."

        

So, speaking the SystemSettings, this is a new component for Mepis borrowed from Ubuntu. It's a wrapper, as such, that calls up most of the kde settings modules. It's designed to replace the KDE Control Center, and that's about all it does at this point. But as stated above, Mepis hopes to integrate their configuration tools into SystemSettings for a one-stop-shop in configuration. The traditional KDE Control Center is still available even if not in the menu, at this point at least.

        

As far as applications, one has the full of KDE and some extra Kapps added, as well as Firefox 1.5.0.1 and OpenOffice 2.0.2. It comes with some other less routine apps such as tools and apps for Bluetooth, streaming webcam video, skype, and Snipe ebay bidder.

        

Multimedia isn't neglected either:

        

Underlying the gui is kernel-2.6.15-20, Xorg 7.0, and gcc 4.0.3. At this early stage, the alpha was still quite stable and usable. Hardware detection was good, performance was adequate, but the fonts were still fugly! Although the signs of Ubuntu are still sparse, you can see ubuntu apps/packages in the Synaptic Software Manager. They are cleverly distinguished by the Ubuntu logo. This shows us several libs and other developmental packages underneath are Ubuntu as well. If you are running stable 3.4.3, there isn't much reason to rush out and load this release. If you are an Ubuntu fan, you too should probably wait. Gnome isn't even included on the livecd. I had massive doubts when Mepis declared their intentions of using Ubuntu for their base system, but if it doesn't change Mepis much more than this, Mepis should remain their own distinctive KDE distro. But time will tell. We'll keep an eye on development for you and let you know.

More Screenshots Here.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.