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I loaded up SimplyMEPIS 6.5 beta 6 cd with lots of expectation. It was just released on 20 of february 2007. It can also be called SimplyMEPIS 32 beta 6. The version has turned into 6.5 since beta 5. According to Warren, the jump from 6.0-4 to 6.5 was necessary to reflect the amount of significant changes made to beta 4. The number 6.5 may not sound interesting but i am sure that its strength has changed significantly.
Xorg 7.0 has been upgraded to 7.1 since beta 5 to enable 3D acceleration. The NVidia driver 1.0.9746 , fglrx driver 8.31.5 and madwifi-ng 0.92 had also been added since beta 5 by Warren. Beryl compositing window manager version 0.2.0rc1 has also been put into the repository together with the emerald and the aquamarine decorators. Networkmanager has also been polished to give better wifi connection. Sun java 6 has been integrated into beta 6. Ntfs-3g program has also been integrated into beta 6. Other than these changes/availability, i didn't notice any special changes to the menu system, applets, icons, or applications. Interestingly , the login screen has clearly printed the password for demo user and root user. At least, a newbie wouldn't have to guess the passwords. The last thing you want to do is to frustrate a newbie's experience from the start. I almost got a dysarrthymic heart-beat the moment i saw the new mepis boot screen. It has more options. With the option to explicitly setting the vertical frequency, i could finally boot my new pentium D celeron desktop with better resolution.
Prior to this , the beta 4 version of SimplMEPIS 32 could only manage a 800x600 resolution on my new pentium D celeron desktop with a 17 inch crt. There graphic chipset was VIA P4M800. There was no vertical setting boot option then. So, I was at the mercy of the " BOOT SMALL (for very old system) " option. When thinking about creating a profession web site to generate revenue, one should consider taking up courses like 70-554 and 220-601 as they are very benefical through the development phase. Next look up on a relevant name for domain name registration and sign up for cheap hosting services. Both windows and linux hostingaffiliate programs the site can be marketed well. Where asbusiness softwarephone service allow a bit more direct marketing which has a better result. can be easily located on the net, so it is up to the user which one to go for. With the help of like voip This time my primary test machine for SimplyMEPIS 32 beta 6 was Dell Inspiron 600m notebook equipped with Pentium M processor (1.4Ghz) , 512 mb sdram, ATI Radeon 250 graphic, AC97' soundcard, IPW2100 built-in intel centrino adapter, and Broadcom BCM5705M gigabit wired ethernet. In this review, i wanted to know how good is the wifi support that comes with SimplyMEPIS 32 beta 6 and whether it can handle 3D eye candy that seems to be so popular these days. As more and more of the desktop market share being metastatically taken away by note-books equipped with wifi component, it is absolutely vital that a Linux desktop be as wifi friendly as possible. Otherwise, people will continue to use windows. As we all know, to run the xgl or aiglx 3d acceleration via linux doesn't need extra resources like Window Vista. I played with Vista for while, it didn't amaze me. Aero or no aero it's still expensive and worst of all, it needed extra hardware power. We are talking about 128mb of graphic memory and about 1gb of pc ram ! On top of that many application just won't work on it. I will review the wifi issue first. In order to enable Wireless support, in my case, i ran the Mepis Network Assistant tool located at the Kmenu->System> MEPIS. Then i enabled the automatic knetworkmanager from the general tab of Mepis Network Assistant tool. After clicking on the apply button, you would be able to see the knetworkmanager applet that looked like a plug-and-a-socket object appearing near to the famous Kweather applet. Then, configuring your wifi card or even wired ethernet card would be easy. I am glad to say that this is the first Linux distro that i managed to connect using WPA-PSK without extra tweaking ! There was also no need to alter/add any scripts. Well, i am truly impressed ! If it was WEP, i wouldn't be that impressed. What Warren claimed was correct. The networkmanager had been polished in SimplyMEPIS 32 beta 6. It even worked while i was in the livecd state !
You can choose which enryption you need. Nobody in my neighbourhood uses WEP. It's WPA-PSK for everybody ! I am talking about home users! As far as my HP officejet 4355 all-in-one printer is concerned, i could use its printing and also scanning function already, as the hplip package has been updated from 0.9.7-4ubuntu1 to 1.7.1-1mepis1. It very nice to know that MEPIS really took the initiatives to maintain a good hardware support/compatibility. Good job Warren! To make life easier for those who needs to keep their NTFS on board, SimplyMEPIS 32 beta 6 has thoughtfully automounted the ntfs partition into the /mnt directory. In read and write mode, of course ! One doesn't need to know how to execute the ntfs-3g tool via fuse in SimplyMEPIS 32 beta 6. You don't even have to edit the fstab file. That simple. Everything has been taken care of ! I haven't come across such a faultless convenience in this area, in other Linux distro. Some people just need to have the ntfs partition. Can't blame them. Warren has also said that the beryl component will be integrated into final SimplyMEPIS 6.5. Eager to try, I downloaded the beryl 0.20 rc1 and also the emerald and aquamarine decorators from the repositories. Everything worked seamlessly with the xorg radeon driver integrated into SimplyMEPIS 32 beta 6. I didn't even need to install the latest official binary fglrx driver from ATI.
By the way, out of curiosity, i did install the latest official binary fglrx driver from ATI, via the mepis X window assistant. The result : my x window server crashed despite having pre-configured it to fallback to the default kde window manager. Before i sign-off, i also want to mention here that i did also try the opt-in boot option provided by the SimplyMEPIS 32 beta 6 CD, on one of my P4 pc with Nvidia Geforce4 Mx4000 graphic card. It crashed ! So, i just rebooted with the normal boot option and installed the beta 6 into my P4 machine. After installing SimplyMEPIS 32 beta 6 on that pentium 4 machine, i fetched the nvidia-glx-legacy driver from the mepis repository. As soon as i rebooted the P4, i was greeted by the nvidia logo during the last part of the bootsplash. Then, the 3d effect worked ! But with a legacy driver. Too bad, the xorg display driver wasn't compatible. Below are the 2 screenshots of the 3D eye candy features, after a successful installation of the official binary legacy driver from Nvidia. All in all, i am seriously considering of putting the final SimplyMEPIS 32 on one of my x86 pentium 4 machine with nvidia card. The reasons: - i) Good out-of-the-box wifi support. My HP Officet 4355 is supported. ii) Have all the apps that i need. It has both konqueror and firefox. Konqueror and firefox has helped me a lot in my non-ICT full time job and also my role as a reviewer and administrator of linuxseekers.com as well. iii) The minor reason is that the 3d effect worked almost out-of-the-box, and i am sure that it will only get better when the final version arrives.
Actually, without these two browsers, i could hardly meet the heterogenous demands in my daily chores. Ironically, I found out that i achieved more with konqueror than with firefox , although firefox is the gold-standard browser. I suppose, what the mind doesn't know, the eyes don't see ! I also would like to take this opportunity to voice IMHO that it is absolutely not right to suggest to a linux distro developer to prescribe a viagra to a nitrate-enhanced konqueror. Thank you for reading my review. By Michael Shee Choon Beng. (
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