Swimming in the Pensieve

I have to confess that, despite the inherent stability, reliability and maturity of most contemporary Linux distros, the lack of serious issues with the MEPIS 6.0-rc2 release has the tendency to impress me.

The rc2 sub-forum at mepis.org ( http://www.mepis.org/forum/161 ) has only 11 issue threads, with a scant 54 entries (at the time of writing). Most of the issues are trivial, at worst–easily worked-around.

System unresponsive when using k3b (burning a CD)? It seems to have solved itself. It’s probably a system process that runs intermittently, via cron. We’ll see on this one. Hopefully some feedback, on the involved laptop, will be forthcoming.
GIMP doesn’t work? Uninstall all of the sane packages, and GIMP works just fine. Looks like a package conflict; like that never happens with windoze programs; the difference being that your system doesn’t end-up cratered after a crash.

A problem saving home directory data was resolved by reinstalling and using the top row of number keys, instead of the numeric keypad, to enter cypher keys.

An issue with GRUB not including a windoze installaion in the selection menu. Windoze is on drive 0 hda2, and MEPIS was installed to hdb. So far, this guy has given so little information about his hardware configuration and the location of GRUB, that it simply is not possible to intelligently assist him. (Some folks are just that way.) He seems to have decided to install MEPIS on another system instead of dual-booting.

A complaint of RC2 not booting off of an adaptec SCSI drive appears to be abandoned, admidst mentions of the driver module actually being present, instead of not; as the OP originally hypothesized. If he goofed, and had hardware initialization delays set too fast, it’s doubtful that he’ll follow-up with an “OOPS!” posting. I’ll advance the suggestion that one should set the PCI delays a bit slower for SCSI adapters, and configure SCSI adapters for reasonably-fast initialization times. (Just good practice, until you optimize your hardware configuration.)

A report of problems with Synaptic Package Manager was made out of ignorance. No problem. You can’t update your system packages when you’re running from the LiveCD. Install it to a hard driove and you don’t have a problem.

A complaint of tray icons being in single horizontal rows was resolved by resizing the vertical tray size to accomodate two rows of icons (simple system setting).

One person complained (probably tongue-in-cheek) about the GIMP not being among the pre-installed packages. DUH! ‘apt-get install gimp’ and you’re done.

Icons popping-up on the desktop, when an NTFS partition is mounted, bugged one guy enough to post about it. Learn to configure your desktop icon behavior, is the lesson on this one.

One person advanced: “I’ve got a Belkin USB Wireless adapter that I can’t get working with any of the 6.x betas or release candidates without manual intervention.” and basically abandoned the issue (AFAICT). It may be that he actually needs to blacklist a driver module, or it may be that his issues were solved by the following remedial action.
Missing hwdata package? Get it from the repos after you installed the distro…problem solved.

The last thread is a “kudos” to the team type of posting, along with a bit of a gripe about repo-lag. Well, repo-lag is a fact of life. Gotta learn patience, or help solve the problem. The big issue here is manpower. (At any rate, that’s not a shot at Rich, as much as it is a statement of the realities of life.)
I only see minor issues, with only one or two of them actually having real impact on anyone except the most windoze- or mac-ingrained of computer neophytes.

All-in-all, I’m seeing a situation that is miles-ahead of the norm, and light years ahead of the windoze world.

When this rc makes it to final release, you’ll probably be hearing quite a bit about it, in the tech-news circles.