Thank you for your recent purchase of a SimplyMEPIS CD or DVD. We have
encountered some issues along the development path that have
significantly delayed the release of a final version of SimplyMEPIS
6.0-4. Most of the problems were due to outdated drivers and packages
that we decided needed to be upgraded to bring MEPIS up to date and to
help us support even more hardware to provide a better experience for
more users. Some of the updates include an upgrade to Xorg 7.1, the
latest graphics drivers for NVIDIA and ATI, improved WiFi support
including greatly improved WPA encryption support, security updates to
the kernel, additional kernel changes to help with hardware support,
improved MEPIS Utilities, and hundreds of updates and improvements
"under the hood." We are also working to improve MEPIS performance
using the window manager, Beryl. Because of these upgrades, we have
needed additional time to compile the packages and to test them to make
sure that we have worked out any major bugs. Also, due to the
significant amount of changes, we found ourselves looking at a major
release instead of the minor release we had originally planned.
Therefore, we have changed the name to SimplyMEPIS 6.5 to reflect these
significant changes.

We are putting the finishing touches on the release of SimplyMEPIS 6.5
Beta 5, which we plan to put out early this week. Once we see how
things are going with this Beta, hopefully we will be moving to release
candidates soon after, which means (barring any unforeseen problems) we
will be going final within a few weeks. Currently, we're projecting a
final release in 4-6 weeks, at which point we will be able to ship you a
final product.

We are extremely grateful for your patience and understanding of the
unpredictable nature of the development cycle. If you are interested in
getting your CD or DVD sooner, rather than later, we can ship you a
version that is still in development; keep in mind, however, that a
version still in development may have some bugs that will be worked out
by the time we have a final version. If this is the case, please
contact me and we will work out the details. Otherwise, we will ship
your product as soon as we have 6.5 finalized. I will contact you again
if any other problems arise.

Nice of them to give you the option anyway.