From mepis.org:

"Morgantown, WV, December 14, 2005: After some minor--and major--changes, SimplyMEPIS offers another release candidate, version 3.4-2 rc1. Look for it in the testing subdirectory at the MEPIS Subscriber's Site and public mirrors. For up to 7 days, please send feedback to dev@mepis.org

The latest Firefox 1.5 has been pulled in from Debian unstable. Warren says, "It's the final version of 1.5 except for changing the name from Deerpark to Firefox. So the code should be identical to Firefox 1.5 Final. Barring unforeseen problems, we are ready to release SimplyMEPIS 3.4 in one week."

New for this rc, the Atheros driver was updated to fix a problem with dropped connections. A couple of overlooked packages were put in for gimp-print and kpilot. Some testers reported that the hplip print system was out of date, so the latest Debian version has been installed from unstable.

Warren explained some other changes, "SimplyMEPIS now includes amarok and kplayer in addition to kaffeine. This gives us the capability to play a very wide range of movie and music files and streams." "We've removed gtkpod since amarok also works with ipod. And we removed xmms because it's redundant in our current configuration. Anyone wanting those apps can easily install them."

Warren continued, "To make room for amarok we had to take out something big. After consulting with some members of the community, we decided to take out Acrobat. But we made sure Kpdf and Kghostview were configured to do the best job possible. Anyone wanting our packaging of acroread can install it from the MEPIS pool."

The SimplyMEPIS bootable CD now sports more games including tuxkart, frozen-bubble, kmahjongg, and samegame. Scribus is back in. As an experiment, Qdvdauthor has been added to the CD, but it's fate depends on user response and the availability of free space on the CD.

The MEPIS pool has been updated to contain the SimplyMEPIS packages that deviate from the Debian Etch pool as of the new freeze date of 12-12-2005. "