I’d like to chime in about my experience with SimplyMEPIS. I installed it on my laptop yesterday and so far, it’s been great! Far better than my experience with Fedora.

SimplyMEPIS is a Debian based disto like Ubuntu is however it is optimized for KDE. (I’ve heard that KUbuntu is being prepared with KDE for it’s interface.) It was awesome to issue “apt-get upgrade” and let it rip. It also has Synaptic to make it even more user friendly. I can even have the Num Lock come on automatically which was one of my pet peeves about GNOME.

Synaptic got me the latest Thunderbird, Python, wx, MySQLdb and resolved all dependencies. Downloaded Dabo and I got everything up and running in short order! Very cool! I even got KPilot to sync between Kontact and my ancient Palm V.

One thing I like about MEPIS is that it comes “fully loaded” with Flash, Java VM, and RealPlayer 10. This was a pain to get all of the media stuff working in Fedora, although I imagine that apt-get would make it pretty easy in Ubuntu.

I had one problem and that was to get to a higher resolution for my laptop display. It only seemed to want to go to 1024×768. After getting a tip from MepisLovers.org, a quick edit to my XF86-Config-4 file and a reboot got me back into my preferred 1600×1024 resolution.

I have heard that MEPIS runs slower than Ubuntu but it performs acceptably on my Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop, PIII 866 w/ 512M RAM.

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