MepisLite.html

MepisLite 3.3.1-2
Breathing Life into the old laptop

Mepis has been known for some time now for creating a very solid usable Debian based distro which has been worked and reworked into a unique and very easy to like Live-CD based Distro. MepisLite takes this to a new level by working out the bloat from the base in order to allow it to run smoothly and reliably on older equipment.
According to the website:

MEPISLite offers the 2.4.29 and 2.6.10 kernels because they seem to work better with older hardware. There are no plans to upgrade to a newer 2.6 kernel at this time.

MEPISLite is an entry level version of desktop MEPIS designed for home users. It has been used successfully with as little as a 2 GB hard drive and a Pentium 2 processor with 128MB of RAM. MEPISLite preinstalls a full complement of software including KOffice, Kontact, and Firefox.

Additionally:

Due to contractual obligations regarding MEPISLite, the final version will not be available for public download.

Soon Technalign will begin to ship a boxed final version of MEPISLite for retailers and resellers. It will be called TaFusion MEPIS Lite OnTheGo. This should not be confused with the original TAFUSION MEPIS ON THE GO which featured the OnTheGo proof-of-concept application, Traveller Disc.

Honestly I have yet to decide how I feel about the last part, according to TaFusion the disc will be for sale as "Mepis on the Go", the current version goes for $24.95. It appears that TaFusion adds in non-gnu based applications not the least of which is a windows conversion application that helps you migrate all you windows programs and settings to Linux.

Installation:

Installation is strictly Mepis in design (Screenshots from Simply Mepis here), in short, you load up the distro from the Live-Cd, click the "Install Me" link and follow the directions. You are given the the chance to create and or select the desired partitions, create a user account, set passwords and install the bootloader. In all, it took about 15 minutes and I had an up and running distro on my old laptop. Impressively, it found and installed drivers for everything my laptop has, included a newer Asus RaLink based WiFI card. This is more than I can say for a great deal of the distros I have loaded onto the laptop. Most of them have no clue what that thing is sticking out of the side of the PC, and if they do recognize it, they need to be convinced to play with it (amazingly difficult process considering I picked the Asus as it uses a natively supported chipset).

First Boot:

Once installed the system booted readily, and logged me into KDE desktop. Perhaps the most impressive part is that KDE ran in a surprisingly usable fashion. I have become used to having KDE only being a transition point for the laptop to get something else installed that runs at a reasonable speed, usually Xfce, this was not the case for Mepislite.

What it has:

MepisLite has a carefully selected assortment of applications that are lightweight, quick and powerfully. Openoffice is skipped for Koffice, Firefox is installed but Mepis suggests using Konqueror for web browsing as it is integrated into KDE and runs much quicker, the same goes for Kmail. It uses a 2.6.10 or 2.4.29 kernel as they are well suited for the light weight needs of the distro, KDE itself is version 3.3.2-1 rather than being anywhere close to the current 3.4.2 version. This allows it to again be quicker and stable on old hardware.

What it has not:

At the risk of being obvious, the most current versions of applications. In all seriousness, the largest issue I have found is the limited amount of applications in the repositories. Actually, there is damn little in the supplied repository which strikes me as odd, as Mepis is generally well stocked in the repository department.

Usage:

Here is where this experiment really shines. I am using it on a Pentium 3 500mhz laptop, and I can honestly say that it really does work as promised. KDE is surprisingly responsive and quick, the included applications are solid and reliable, although your favorite may not be here in order to keep the load light and responsive. Getting that favorite app is not currently easy unless you are willing to take a chance on compatibility issues, one can (and I did) link apt-get up to the full Debian stable repositories which gave me the ability to install a huge amount of applications without causing the upgrade of KDE and several of the other intentionally older version applications. This did not cause the computer to become unstable or have problems, however Mepis does warn that it can. I do not recommend this unless you know what you are doing and understand the potential problems such a change can introduce. There are apps that I am not willing to live without that were simply not included nor available without hitting the Debian repositories.

Conclusions:

Quick, stable and highly usable come to mind as the easiest manner to describe what Mepis has created here. I hesitate to wholly recommend it as it is destined to be a for sale only product living outside the world of GNU. It is a great piece of work that delivers on what it has promised, but I am uncomfortable with a product such as this being for sale only, and not being available in an un-supported version as well.

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