The Simply MEPIS 3.4-3 RC3 has been released

It is hoped that SimplyMEPIS release candidate, version 3.4-3 rc3 addresses the remaining major issues reported by the test community. Look for it in the testing subdirectory at the MEPIS Subscriber's Site and public mirrors. It is believed that all of the udev issues have been fixed in the OSCenter. By popular demand, install GRUB at root is an option during installation. The install tips were updated. All users were added to the lp group, this was needed for third party printer utilities.

Morgantown, WV, January 23, 2005: It is hoped that SimplyMEPIS release candidate, version 3.4-3 rc3 addresses the remaining major issues reported by the test community. Look for it in the testing subdirectory at the MEPIS Subscriber's Site and public mirrors. For up to 7 days, please send feedback to dev@mepis.org

It is believed that all of the udev issues have been fixed in the OSCenter. By popular demand, install GRUB at root isan option during installation. The install tips were updated. All users were added to the lp group, this was needed for third party printer utilities. A missing hotplug file was reinstalled. This may help some users with unrecognized scanners. Canoscan scanners were added to the plustek.conf file. The floppy driver is being loaded automatically, like in previous versions of SimplyMEPIS. But automatic floppy unmount is unreliable due to a pumount-dbus bug in KDE 3.4.3. It sort of works.

The KDE Restart Computer function no longer offers the option of choosing which OS to restart. This feature is incompatible with the graphical version of GRUB. The modules config was changed to eliminate erroneous attempts to load ext3 or reiserfs. These modules are built-in the kernel and are never loaded on the fly. The OnTheGo startup code had to be modified to workaround a recent questionable change to gconf. The Debian keyring was updated to include the 2006 Debian key. OpenOffice was updated to version 2.0.1-1 to fix a problem with creating databases. By request gpgsm was installed. Ntpdate was reinstalled and rdate was removed to fix a problem when setting the date automatically in kcontrol.

The build was tested with many pluggable devices including Logitech webcam, Canon camera, Panasonic DV camera, Mac Ipod, and Palm Pilot. Everything worked smoothly except the Pilot which was finicky about syncing. The KDE file associations for multimedia were greatly improved. Apple movie trailers in Konq.

Free Downloads
You can download testing and released versions of MEPIS for free from the mirror sites listed below. Usually the testing versions are in a testing directory and the released versions are in a released directory. Sometimes the mirrors are a bit behind the MEPIS Premium download site. Some mirrors get out-of-date from time to time. If you can't find a particular version at one site, it may be available at one of the other sites.

North American Mirrors
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/mepis/
ftp://ftp-linux.cc.gatech.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mepis/
ftp://ftp.cise.ufl.edu/pub/mirrors/mepis/
http://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mepis ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mepis

European Mirrors
ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/mepis/
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/mepis/
http://www.debianworld.net/pub/mirror/mepis/
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/distributions/mepis/released/