my computer blog

Easy to try

Yep, it is. A very simple boot process first gave me a bunch of different ways to boot the CD - including a couple of "light" boots for slower and older systems. Very useful! Though I'm testing this on my older P3 866Mhz machine with 256Mb RAM, I decided to let it go on the standard setup, which it did after 20 seconds. I quickly reached a logon prompt - the first time I've had one of those, every other distro has taken me straight to the desktop. It doesn't matter either way, generally people who have used a computer in an office environment know what a logon screen is about. The funny thing is the logon screen advises you what the username and password is! Username and password demo, or for root (ie administrator) logon, username and password root. I log on with username and password demo and go straight to the desktop. Shades of Windows here as although I reached the desktop, it worked for a while on generating icons and other bits and pieces before it was actually ready to use. Again, no big deal really, and the total load time was certainly no slower than any other Live CD I've tried so far.

Again, it's KDE, although this time the taskbar doesn't go all the way across the screen, there is a gap either side. It seemed to have chosen quite a high resolution for the screen, all text is quite small but readable. The one slightly disappointing thing is the size of the clock - I prefer a big clock as I tend to let time slide by if I'm not reminded! The clock on this is too small. So, I click on the clock and get a calendar. Nice. Right-click on the clock and one of the options is "configure", so I click that - I find "digital clock", an LCD-style display, is a bit bigger, but doesn't give options to change the size. "Fuzzy clock" has plenty of options and is real cute - according to where you set the "fuzziness" slider, the display will be words ranging from "a quarter to ten" to "almost noon" to "end of week". I'm not sure if I could get used to that, but it's cute nonetheless. (edit: yep I'm getting used to the clock. It shows the time in words just as you'd speak it - it's a ridiculously easy way to tell the time!)

Easy to use

I tried to access the hard drive and found since I did the dirty on Windows to get the CD in (started the computer, opened the CD drive to get the CD in then restarted the PC without letting Windows finish loading), it doesn't want to mount it. So I reboot again - noting the power button is working - it shut down to a certain point and ejected the CD, so I took it out and closed the drawer, and the PC shut down. Beautiful! Start up again, let Windows load and complete a disk scan, then put the CD in again and reboot. Mepis starts again and I've got access to the NTFS hard drive. I'm really impressed with this process. They made it so that it's careful with Windows partitions, and makes the process easy to do so - about as easy as you can make rebooting into Windows to check the hard disk and back into Mepis.

Once I had done this, accessing the hard drive was a snap. One of the icons on the right of the taskbar is a collection of 3 colourful cubes, it's an application called kwikdisk. Clicking on this brought up all the devices connected to the system - a couple of ramdrives mounted by Mepis, the CD drive, the floppy drive, and two hard disk icons. One says it does not exist - curious, I'm not sure why that is there - and the other is the hard drive, clicking on it brings up conqueror displaying the contents of the drive. Also on the desktop is icons for the CD, floppy and the USB flash drive I've plugged in. I note the whole interface is single-click.

The speed of the interface is fine, not quite as snappy as DesktopBSD or Kanotix, but certainly close. The same features are there for customising the desktop and taskbar (seems to be referred to as the kickbar in the help pages? I prefer that name to taskbar actually - "task" is so menial).

One small gripe, now that I've been using it a bit, is the icon for the USB flash drive I've got plugged in keeps disappearing - in fact it keeps losing the device, by the looks of it, because it shows a blank window when I open it from kwikdisk. Unplugging the flash drive and plugging it in again reconnects it. I'm not sure why it keeps getting lost though.

OpenOffice.org rocks!

Okay, this is nice. Since I haven't used OpenOffice before, I'll just mention it here: I click on any Word .doc file (made with MS Word 2003) and OpenOffice launches and displays the document. Flawlessly. Including headers and footers. I have a couple of documents which are locked down (protected) so that the user can only enter information in the fields provided, in the form of tick boxes, dropdown boxes as well as text fields, and all of it is displayed correctly and I can interact with it properly. Excel spreadsheets also open properly, showing all worksheets, and calculating formulas correctly. OpenOffice.org has done it right - and I think it's a great idea of the Mepis developers to include it as part of the Live CD.

I can edit and save them as well. It popped up and warned me that some formatting may not be saved in a Word 2003 format and recommended I save in Open Document Format instead, but allowed me to save it anyway. That's a nice way of saying that Open Office does actually have some cool features that MS Office doesn't. I saved them to my USB drive and reopened them again in Word 2003 and changes are saved fine.

Extra Features

Also included on the CD is my new favourite image editor and photoshop/fireworks eater The Gimp, as well as the lovely cousin of Compiz that makes your Linux look fancier than Vista or OSX, Beryl, a range of arcade, card and board games, and the usual range of graphics, internet and multimedia applications. The hardware support seems pretty comprehensive too. Features wise it comes in only behind Kanotix in sheer number of applications.

The neat little weather report tool sitting next to the clock is a nice addition. It didn't take long for me to find and set it to my world location once I connected to the internet (ie plugged in my network cable and watched it autodetect the network connection), the one thing I'd like it to do is show the local temperature in Celsius instead of this incomprehensible American Farenheit rubbish. It seems they also included an extra plugin for Konqueror too for auto-checking spelling, so all the words it doesn't recognise are showing up red - including my New Zealand/British spelling. It seems a British or New Zealand english dictionary is not included but I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find one. Or turn it off somehow.

All in all I've found Mepis to be a very worthy Live CD with some handy extra features. I might see if I can get beryl going off the CD on a more substantial machine. It gave some error messages and politely took me back to the logon screen when I tried on this 9-year-old Pentium III 866Mhz (0.86GHz OMG!) with 256Mb RAM. No other performance complaints on this old machine though, and generally I've found it quite the full-featured user-friendly OS. I'll add some notes once I've tried it on other machines.

Disclaimer: this piece is a work in progress and will continue to change until this disclaimer is removed.