SimplyMepis 8.5

“I have been looking forward to the release of SimplyMepis 8.5
for at least six months. I used SimplyMepis 8.0 the first half of
last year with its KDE 3.5 desktop and was very content. I was late
to the KDE 4 bandwagon, but I became interested last summer when
reports pegged it as stable and usable. Reports were already
circulating that the next release of Mepis would have KDE 4 as the
desktop. It was a long hard wait, but the opportunity finally
arrived on March 30 with the release of SimplyMepis 8.5. Under the
Hood

“SimplyMepis desktop

“This release of MEPIS is an update to version 8.0 released last
year. Although many bugfixes, enhancements, and features have been
added, much of the underlying code has remained the same. For
example this release was compiled with GCC 4.3.2 like 8.0 and still
uses Glibc 2.7, Perl 5.10.0, Python 2.5.2, and Xorg X Server 1.4.2.
That doesn’t mean significant updates haven’t been applied. Qt was
updated to 4.5.3, GTK+ updated to 2.18.3, and the kernel updated to
2.6.32. Basically, SimplyMepis 8.5 was updated as much as possible
without breaking compatibility with Debian 5.0 Lenny.

“A newer kernel was implemented in order to support some of the
newer hardware that may have come into use since 2.6.27 was
released. MEPIS uses the kernel from the Debian developmental
branch and Debian is known to patch its kernels for features,
security and bug fixes. A few fixes found in recent patch sets
include code to repair breakage in Dosemu and Wine, expand some bug
reporting information, and fix a Debian-specific bug in modules.dep
generation by module-init-tools. Linux 2.6.32 brought support for
goodies such as ATI R600/R700 3D graphic cards, Micrel KS8851
Ethernet chips, ACPI 4.0, and CX25821 and Hauppauge HVR TV
cards.”

Complete
Story