Yesterday, the MEPIS developers released SimplyMEPIS 11.0, a year after the release of SimplyMEPIS 8.5, which I have reviewed before. (I went back and read that review and had a pretty good laugh at how short and shallow it was. Please feel free to do the same. That said, if you feel like doing the same at this review, please explain why in the comments.) In that review, I liked that it included many codecs and useful programs out-of-the-box along with the MEPIS tools, which were basically the Linux Mint tools before Linux Mint existed. I didn't like that Synaptic Package Manager refused to work.
For those who don't know, MEPIS was one of the original user-friendly Linux distributions (notwithstanding Slackware, which was user-friendly for its time), alongside Mandrake (now Mandriva); furthermore, it was the original user-friendly Debian-based distribution, as it came into existence two years prior to Ubuntu. On that note, interestingly, in a sign that Ubuntu really has stolen the spotlight, many articles announcing the release of SimplyMEPIS 11.0 accidentally called it "SimplyMEPIS 11.04", referring to the recent release of Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal". Furthermore, like Mandriva, it started with KDE, though while Mandriva has since then grown a GNOME variant as well, MEPIS has stuck exclusively with KDE; that said, there is a variant of MEPIS called AntiX which uses the lightweight Fluxbox and IceWM instead of KDE.
Though I didn't write that in the old review, I tested SimplyMEPIS 8.5 a year ago using a live USB made with UnetBootin. Although the MEPIS wiki says that using the "dd" command is faster and easier, it seems to imply that SimplyMEPIS 11.0 can still be written to a USB correctly with UnetBootin, so I did just that. I thought about testing the installation procedure, but I ended up not doing so for reasons that will become more clear if you follow the jump.
For those who don't know, MEPIS was one of the original user-friendly Linux distributions (notwithstanding Slackware, which was user-friendly for its time), alongside Mandrake (now Mandriva); furthermore, it was the original user-friendly Debian-based distribution, as it came into existence two years prior to Ubuntu. On that note, interestingly, in a sign that Ubuntu really has stolen the spotlight, many articles announcing the release of SimplyMEPIS 11.0 accidentally called it "SimplyMEPIS 11.04", referring to the recent release of Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal". Furthermore, like Mandriva, it started with KDE, though while Mandriva has since then grown a GNOME variant as well, MEPIS has stuck exclusively with KDE; that said, there is a variant of MEPIS called AntiX which uses the lightweight Fluxbox and IceWM instead of KDE.
Though I didn't write that in the old review, I tested SimplyMEPIS 8.5 a year ago using a live USB made with UnetBootin. Although the MEPIS wiki says that using the "dd" command is faster and easier, it seems to imply that SimplyMEPIS 11.0 can still be written to a USB correctly with UnetBootin, so I did just that. I thought about testing the installation procedure, but I ended up not doing so for reasons that will become more clear if you follow the jump.
