Hi, mdlinuxwolf.

Which beta version of Mep6.5 did you use? The early ones had a problem with Centrino wireless. I beta-tested & bug-reported on them all for wireless on the LiveCD. Beta 6, 7 and RC1 are pretty good in the wireless department.

Note that the wireless is not an automatic connect. You need to go into the system configurations in the Networking section to enable it.

I tested the live CD in the laptop. I noted erratic behavior with the touchpad for the mouse and the wireless said to reboot for it to work. Obviously, with a live CD, that isn't possible. I just don't think that Mepis is a good fit for that particular laptop. If you notice that many problems that fast, try another distro.

Mandriva Metisse gets online and behaved more normally as expected. Metisse was unstable on my desktop, perhaps because I used Ext3 instead of reiser for a file system.

Fortunately, Mepis 6.5 seems to be a great fit for my old desktop. I used Reiser this time and it feels more solid. The region free DVD thing is up and running. The version is Simply Mepis 32, with the newer kernel. I also used the open source Nvidia driver. I managed to kill Xserver forever when I tried to force an install with the last closed source Nvidia driver. The last desktop from Mepis 6.0 was only 1024 x 768. This one is 1280 x 1024, which is much more usable.

I would avoid the "experimental" desktop. I would run with the newest kernel . & yes, it does see SATA 2 drives.

Well, without knowing which version of 6.5 you used, I can't comment in detail. On all of them it is possible to restart the network connection without rebooting.
Obviously if that doesn't work, it's impossible to set a new config and reboot off a LiveCD --as was the case for me in beta releases 1-4. That's when I stopped testing and sent in the ol' bug report!

I never use the touchpad --always connect a USB mouse. I'd use one if I had to, but I have big fingers and just don't like them. So I can't compare notes with you on that one.

I used to use reiser when I was running SuSE, but the difference in the performance didn't strike me as obvious. From what I've read about the filesystem design --especially what Hans Reiser himself writes!-- it seems to be a superior design. I know Mepis will install using reiser instead of ext3 if you prefer, but I haven't tried it on my current desktop. Maybe I'll try it on my laptop when I install RC2 as a test.

Yes, the available drop-down resolutions available under Mepis leave something to be desired. Both my desktop display and my laptop are wide-screen --not available with one-click config. Fortunately it's fairly easy to edit the xorg.conf. I'm getting my laptop in it's native 1280x800 and my Samsung desk DFP at 1440x900 with 120x120 dpi. Very crisp!

If you're unhappy with your screen res, let me know and maybe we can tweak it a little. I'd rather wait a few days, tho. I'm a litle busy right now. Of course, maybe you already know how to do that.

The Mepis 6.5 betas since beta 6 have the option to install the latest driver from nVidia or the legacy driver from nVidia right at install time. The only thing is that the newest nVidia driver package obsoletes a number of older chips. To be sure you have one it supports, see:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

And thanks for reminding me about FeiserFS, mdlinuxwolf. I do want to explore that some more.

The Reiser file system has been test and thouroughly de-bugged for quite some time. All the other distros that caused me problems were using ext3. I install Linux on a SATA 2 Western Digital drive inside of a computer too old to run a SATA 2. Therefore I use a Promise adapter card, which fits into my last vacant PCI slot.

Since Reiser has been tested in SCSIs with adapter cards for quite some time, perhaps it just translates better in the real world. Reiser is far more stable then anything Microsoft has to offer. It resists fragmentation, holds up better if power is lost suddenly, and can be used with almost any type of hard drive.

At my first post in this thread I was running Mepis 6.0 on a Dell Latitude C-600, 1GHz processor and 384 MB RAM. Except for a bit of frustration getting the wireless card to work setup was a breeze. It all worked quite well after that, too. Recently, I installed 6.5 RC2 on the same laptop. Installation was w/o a hitch and performance is great.

After finally getting a good burn on 6.1, the distro loaded on the first try, picked up every peice of hardware and was stable running, I need to tweek the ksynaptics file but the only bugs I've had were in Firefox
Kudos to Mepis.

MEPISLite-3.3.2.1.rc1 does a great job on an IBM ThinkPad 570 with a
PII 366 and 192MB ram. KStars is a nice plus.

It also does a fine job on a Toshiba PIII 1200 with 256MB with built-in 811b easily
configured with KWificonfg. Win98SE was problematic and my friend needs level of
complexity closer to a toaster. Apparently, SimplyMEPIS-cd-6.5rc.2_32 needs more than
256MB to boot properly.

MEPISLite-3.3.2.1.rc1 also did the job for a beastly Celery (no meat) 1200, with 256MB
on a lousy motherboard. I realize it's NOT a notebook, but it's more limited than many.
The 10/100 Ethernet on-board is fine, but the graphics STINK. 800x600, 1MB shared ram,
is the Maximum allowed, PCI, but no AGP. When booting it's necessary to press <RETURN>
followed by <0> to force the adapter into 80x25 text mode. After that everything works
OK, but even my ThinkPad has better embedded graphics than that! (1024x768 2MB and just
works!)

When the Toshiba is upgraded to 512MB I'll try SimplyMEPIS-cd-6.5rc.3_32.

I'm using MEPIS 3.4 on a Philips Freevents x56 laptop. It is the only Linux distro and version that works (i.e. other Linux and MEPIS versions dont work). I've only installed it yesterday and to date the only issue has been solving the resolution, which did not boot at 1280x800, which is what is native to my display. I corrected this using 915resolution, which you can download (my laptop has an Intel 950GMA chipset for the display). I don't seem to have correct codecs to play commercial DVDs, and I must say that installing/uninstalling software is much less intuitive than on PCBSD (which is a friendly verion of FreeBSD). However, Mepis 3.4 runs and boots faster on my laptop than PCBSD did, so I'm willing to stick with it to see how far I can get. I hope to set up VMWare player and/or Win4Lin to see how they get on with a WinXP virtual machine.

I answered your post for dvd help on this thread. Try the apps I said to get. It should help you play dvds.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=542687
That's the link.

MEPIS 6.5 recently arrived. Has anyone taken it for a spin on a laptop?

I've been using 6.0 on my lappy for several months now. There have only been a couple of minor issues.
1.) At installation, the synaptics touchpad doesn't configure to allow scrolling. I solved that by popping in a Kubuntu live cd and copying the xorg.conf file to the hard drive.
2.)The lappy came with that #%@^*&# broadcom 4318 chip, so I had the ususal fun with ndiswrapper and windows drivers, but the whole thing is pretty well documented in the forums at mepislovers.org.
3.) Worst of all, infrequent, sporadic freezes. Seems to only happen when using the wireless and browsing the net. Haven't really been irritated enough to chase this one down yet.
I have been unable to install 6.5 as yet. For some unknown reason, the installer hangs at exactly 38%. I am happy w/ 6.0, so I'll wait until 6.5 matures a bit and try again.
As ususal, Warren Woodford has put together a set of really useful features in a user-friendly package. Kudos to the MEPIS team!

This work:

Mepis 6.5rc3 (LiveCD and installed) on Dell Latitude D620 with D-Link DWL-G630 AirPlus WiFi

The Dell built-in WiFi does not work with any Linux I've tried - K/U/Xbuntu, Knoppix, Mepis, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS.