Why cannot I access
http://non-us.debian.org
files? I have like 6 or 8 repositories that don't work any more... is it due to Debian 3.1? Have things changed/moved? or is it just down for a moment? (maybe its running $erver 2003 hehehe)

all the non-us repos no longer exist, disable them.

hmm... so where are those files?

thanks mos!

All moved to the regular debian repos. Moved, not removed.

In synaptic you can disable those repos by going to settings>repositories and unchecking the offending ones.

if you like editing files yourself you can use /etc/apt/sources.list and remove or comment out the offending lines

"Wayne" in another post said that non-us were removed and that he apt'ed Limewire from somewhere; he now cannot and so he thinks they were in that repository. So if the files/apps were just moved, where to?

more broadly, where do I find (via a browser) which packages are available in a repository, or where can I find a list of different repositories? How do i know if one is safe for Mepis, or for any other deb-based distro? I just read about "alioth" or something, which is a new one to me, and I am guessing that their are hundreds of repositories out there that I am not aware of. How different are their contents?

apt-get.org has most every repository listed and you can search them.