The experiment is still continuing. Last night we installed SimplyMEPIS onto the hard drive. Mrs.devnet did not get a whole lot of time to spend on it…she simply checked out some of the menu’s and the organization. She clicked on a few things, found the KDE Desktop Wizard and set up her environment with a Windows-Like behavior (i.e., double clicks, etc). However, with this distribution, I have not had to intervene at all as I previously did in four places with Mandrake.
The first place I intervened on Mandrake 10.1 was ‘alsaconf’ to get the sound running. With MEPIS, I did not have to do this…sound was enabled right off the start. I also didn’t have to point her toward installation of Java or Flash as I previously did as these are installed by default as well. Yet another task I didn’t have to do is mount the Windows share. This was also done by default and the icon was present on her desktop. Mrs.Devnet maintains her smtp and pop passwords and usernames to configure her mail. I suspect she’ll have few problems configuring her email client up but I’ll assist her like I did in Mandrake to even out the playing field.
Mrs.devnet will be using the desktop this week and finding out how it suits her. She’ll use both KDE and Gnome since SimplyMEPIS also comes able to use either desktop. She’ll use SimplyMEPIS for the next week and post back on her findings. I’ll give you a hint though…I did see a smile on her face when she opened up her website and the java mp3 player began to play. Keep tuned! More to follow this week…she’ll post her initial take on things sometime in the next couple of days.
Good info on Mepis, I wasn’t aware that so much came preconfigured.
Which SimplyMEPIS version?
I went ahead and put SM 3.3 test 2 on the drive. I figured since I put Mandrake 10.1 Community, I might as well put a beta/test on for MEPIS as well. I’m told this release is code frozen anyways and will only have bug patches before a final release on the 14th. Thus far I have found no bugs.
Thanks.