anyone use mepis?

[OBLAMA2009]

what do you think of this distro. also i cant get it to recognize my atheros wireless card. any tips?

 

[accguy9009]

I first used Simply Mepis 3.0 back in the day. It was my first Linux experience and it was so simple for a newbie. My windows disks were auto recognized and it went online via ethernet like a champ and all my music, pics, vids played easy as you please. Like many I lost interest and tried Mepis 6, 6.5, 7 at various times. My biggest complaint was I have a Netgear Wireless USB adapter, WG111v2 and I never could get it to work in Mepis. I knew my best hope was to use the NDIS wrapper option but NDIS wrapper did not come as part of the distro. I was advised by members of the Mepis community to install it via tar and all that that entails. I am not someone who has experience with compiling from source or has a working knowledge of the command line.

I bitched a bit on the Mepis community forums and was attacked as a hater. I tried PCLinux and Mandriva and found a very user friendly but powerfull control center and by selecting create new internet connection the NDIS wrapper option was built in. It required the windows 98 driver(which is on the installation CD). I copied it to a thumb drive and put the driver on the desktop or in the home folder and followed the easy GUI and it worked like a champ.

Mepis has gone back and forth over the years I believe being Debian based and then not. I was never able to get my Netgear USB adapter working in Ubuntu either. I spent hours and hours trying to get it working in Ubuntu using various tricks and gave up. I wish more people would use Mandriva as it is a very polished OS, has good community support and it works quite well. Also it is not Ubuntu which everyone fawns all over. Not hating on Ubuntu but if you want a USB adapter to work easily use the NDIS wrapper in Mandriva and you should get where you need to be.

 

[earthman]

Mepis 8 uses Debian 5 as a base, and has extensive control panels to configure networks and alot of other things. Common wireless adapters should be no problem. It's not fair to compare experiences with something that is 5 versions back. That would be like telling someone what Windows is like based on your experiences with Windows Millenium. I think if you try it, you'll like it, it is aimed at the everyday user, not power users who want every feature and then some. I may try it myself later today, I'm looking for a new installation to try out. You might also consider Xubuntu, which is Ubuntu with an Xfce interface that is cleaner and faster (also simpler) than the regular version. I've been using it on my laptop and I'm very impressed with how it works. I've used Mandriva as well, and it is a fine distro as well.

 

[accguy9009]

Sadly earthman the OP can't get his atheros card recognized by the distro. Over the years I have seen numerous people with those cards having trouble getting them to work, including Ubuntu. At that time, when I couldn't get my Netgear USB adapter to work on Ubuntu or Mepis, it worked like a champ on PCLinux and Mandriva.My thing was I found the folks that replied to my post on the Mepis support boards to be highly critical of anyone who found anything about the distro they didn't care for to be labeled as a hater of the distro. My opinion was the distro should have had native support if you needed to use the NDIS wrapper option. Mepis did not at the time. He can't get his card working today so it looks like not much has changed over time. My netgear adapter was very popular and I saw numerous folks trying without sucess to get it working on Mepis and Ubuntu. Mandriva made it easy to do it with NDIS. I just get tired of everyone always saying Ubuntu is the default distro for the masses. Glad you like Ubuntu, I do too.

 

[Nothinman]

Depending on the model, it's probably just a firmeware issue.