Well, I've been tinkering around with Mepis since yesterday morning. I have to say that I'm quite impressed.

It was nice to use the Mepis CD to first try it LIVE, to make sure my PC hardware was compatible. It was. So I proceeded to install in on my hard drive.

The only thing I found confusing about the install was that it appeared that Mepis was only going to utilize three existing partions on my hard drive: /, /swap, and /home.

I have (or had) /usr as a partition on the drive, but Mepis did not seem interested in using it. On my 120GB hard drive, to pass on 40GB for /usr was not something I was going to do. So, I repartitioned my drive, reallocating the space for /usr to /. Once I did this, Mepis was using the entire drive. I couldn't figure out any other way of getting around this.

Also, the partition tool Mepis wanted me to use, QTParted, didn't seem to give me the kind of control over my hard drive as I was used to. I used my ALT Linux installation disk to do my partitioning.

After this small roadblock was taken care of, everything else went smoothly. It would have been nice to have the option of adding another user (other than just a single default user) when setting up the system. But I can understand the idea of trying to make the install as easy as possible for the Linux newbie.

I also like the idea of using Apt-get and Synaptic to do my package handling. This is what I'm most comfortable using and it seems to be a better package handling system than others I've tried.

It even self-configured the 3D graphics support for my Nvidia card and my new HP 3-in-1 printer/scanner. The only thing I had to install myself was XSane to handle my scanning (and the important HP hpoj support driver). That was easy, of course, with the use of Apt-get.

All in all, the system works great. I also like the way Mepis handles removable media (well from what I've seen so far). My wife has always run into problems with those Supermount desktop drive icons.


I'm looking forward to getting one of those USB Flash drives now, so I can take my Mepis Linux OS along with me where ever I go (that in combination with the bootable CD allows any PC to be a Linux PC).


I'm also looking forward to working with this distro. more in the coming months. I'm sure its next release will be even better.

I am going to try Mepis soon and enjoyed reading about your experience with it. Alt Linux is another distro. which interested me. What was your experience with it and how does it compare to Mepis ?
I recently tried PCLinux OS and liked it very much as a live cd distro but too many bugs appeared when I installed it on my hard drive.