Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Mepis 8: It's a beautiful thing!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I used Mepis for quite a while, back in the Mepis 6 days. I have to say that I am very glad to see that they have gone back to using a Debian base and repositories instead of Ubuntu (which is Debian based). Why put one more layer of complexity between you and Debian?

So, in my developing desktop, I am using Mepis 8 beta, KDE 3.5.9, and the beautiful Xaphire theme mentioned in my previous post, which satisfies my need for a dark glassy classy look. Perhaps I don't need to hurry in reinstalling KDE 4.1!

Mepis 8 also provides the tools to help me with another issue... network configuration. I really don't have a difficult setup... Verizon dsl, Actiontec router, & ethernet card. Somehow, though, I've been having issues, even since the new ethernet card. I'm beginning to wonder if the router is going bad. At any rate, the Mepis Network Assistant has been helpful each time in getting the connection reestablished.

Other tools that I use a lot which are included in Mepis 8, or available in their standard repositories (accessible through Synaptic)--

  • GIMP, (Gnu Image Manipulation Program: an open-source alternative to Photoshop), Blender (3-D modeling and animation),
  • OpenOffice 3.0 (Microsoft Office alternative)
  • Firefox 3.0.1
  • Synaptic 0.62.1, my favorite package manager
  • Bibletime 1.6.5.1, a great Bible study program
A couple of other nice things:
  • automatic recognition and mounting of usb memory sticks, external hard drives, etc.
  • Flashplayer works perfectly "out of the box" at Youtube, Foxnews, etc.
Stay tuned...

3 comments:

  1. Is it an Actiontec GT701? If so, they really don't like ipv6. For awhile I thought you'd just have to blacklist the module, since most distributors aren't building it into the kernel anymore. But in at least some distributions, I've found a need to still use the following in my modprobe.conf

    alias net-pf-10 off

    But some distributions like Ubuntu don't have issues with ipv6, go figure. Fedora, Arch, and some others are very slow.

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  2. As mentioned in later posts, the modem itself was cooked. New modem... no more troubles!

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