Vlogcanic

Warren Woodford has had a long carrer as far as informatics is concerned. He’s been involved in testing and deploying household techologies such as the T1 data connection, data modems and digital banking. He held a job at NeXT in which he developed a document and multimedia integration environment called “The Library”. From 2002 on he’s been involved in Linux by founding and developing Simply Mepis, a desktop distro.

Woodford’s initial idea for his new Linux distribution was to turn Debian’s unstable branch into an friendly Linux desktop system with a friendly installation process something unavailable at the time from the big players back in those days (SuSe, Mandriva, Red Hat). The result was SimplyMEPIS’ first release on May 10th 2003.

SimplyMEPIS

MEPIS LLC is Woodford’s company and SimplyMEPIS its flagship product.

From the first version it offered an installation LiveCD (which was a novelty as previously available LiveCDs, such as Knoppix, were not installable) and focused on ease of use and installation as well as desktop tasks.

It’s available for Intel and AMD 32-bit and 64 bit architectures but KDE is the only desktop graphical environment.

Base System: Debian / Ubuntu / Debian.

From it inception SimplyMEPIS was supposed to be a way to produce a friendly and useful OS starting from Debian’s Sid and so it remained between 2003 and July 2006 when SimplyMEPIS 6.0 was released with a new Ubuntu base system and full compatibility with Ubuntu’s binary software repositories.

The move to Ubuntu didn’t last for long (only versions 6.0 and 6.5) and SimplyMEPIS 7.0 went back to Debian. This time the core system is from Debian’s stable branch and the applications are compiled from the latest sources available either from Debian’s unstable or Ubuntu. The reason for building SimplyMEPIS in such a way is, according to Woodford, to have a very stable core with up to date applications and cutting edge software so that users don’t need to reinstall their distro every six months and so the new SimplyMEPIS becomes a Linux distro with a very long useful life.

Downloads.

SimplyMEPIS can be downloaded freely from the MEPIS website and mirrors. MEPIS LCC encourages happy users to buy a download subscription from the official web site as it’s their main income source.

Other Comments.

It’s not infrequent to see MEPIS along with other big names in lists with titles such as “The top 10 Linux distros” or something alike. It’s very appreciated because of their innovations an contributions to the Linux community and for the years they helped to push hardware support and automatic configuration but, it must be said, it’s a field in which they’ve been lagging behind in the last few versions, specially when WiFi adaptors and graphics cards are concerned.