SimplyMEPIS 7.0 Prebeta – A First Look

With so many beta releases coming in the near future, I have decided to install them to provide my readers screenshots. These articles will not contain much useful information regarding the release, but will give a brief overview of how the system looks. Yesterday, the first release pre-release version of SimplyMEPIS 7.0 was announced. This is a prebeta release (alpha to many users) meaning that this is still in major testing and should not be used for production machines requiring stability.

This release marks the end of a great Ubuntu-based distribution, but the beginning of a spectacular distribution based on Debian – and yes, I do know that Ubuntu is based on Debian. Below is a section of the MEPIS press release, courtesy of MEPIS. Please read the rest of the press release for more information.

MEPIS has discontinued using Ubuntu binary packages in favor of a combination of MEPIS packaged binaries based on Debian and Ubuntu source code which is combined with a Debian Stable OS core and extra packages from Debian package pools.

Warren Woodford of MEPIS explains the change “By using the latest Debian and Ubuntu source code for building user applications, we can provide the best latest versions of the applications users want the most. And by building on top of a Debian Stable core, we can provide a release that has the the stability and long life that users want.”

Warren continues “Most Linux users are tired of having to reinstall every 6 months in order to have up-to-date applications. We expect that with this approach MEPIS can offer a superior user experience that will be incrementally upgradeable for 2 years without reinstallation of the OS.”

The prebeta includes a 2.6.22 kernel, Debian Etch core, KDE 3.5.7, Firefox 2.0.0.5, Thunderbird 2.0.0.4, and OpenOffice 2.2.1. This is an early release with many rough edges. In particular the splashy boot splash does not run reliably, some extra kernel drivers are not yet compiled for the new kernel, some gui components are not themed for MEPIS, and the prebeta has had very limited testing.

I have been playing with the system for the past few hours and have not had one hiccup when it comes to web-browsing, document creation, FTP, or mild system admin. While I have noticed very few differences, I look forward to seeing how this great system looks for the official 7.0 release expected later this year.

Feel free to check out my SimplyMEPIS 6.5 review or for those readers that just wantto see some screenshots for this prebeta release follow the link!