MEPIS comienza el regreso a debian

As expected, Warren Woodford of MEPIS Linux has announced that the next version of SimplyMEPIS 6.9.51 will be based on Debian Linux instead of Ubuntu.

As Woodford explained recently, he is switching MEPIS from using Ubuntu to using Debian as its base operating system because Ubuntu's "Dapper was not updated in the way our users expected. ... The fact is Dapper was updated with security fixes, but not with new versions of the applications."

At first, Woodford worked around this, he said. "In 6.5 [the last version of MEPIS], I attempted to create an incremental path forward for MEPIS and Dapper by compiling newer versions of applications for the 6.0 base, and with a lot of work I succeeded for that release. However, along the way I discovered that many of the packages in the Ubuntu Dapper pools were greatly out of date and not very useful to MEPIS and Dapper users," he said on July 30.

With this pre-beta, which is a preview of the upcoming SimplyMEPIS 7, MEPIS has discontinued using Ubuntu binary packages in favor of a combination of MEPIS packaged binaries based on Debian and Ubuntu source code. These programs will run on top of a Debian Stable OS core, which will also be using packages from the Debian package pools.

"By using the latest Debian and Ubuntu source code for building user applications, we can provide the best [and] 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 stability and long life that users want," Woodford, in Morgantown, W.Va., explained in a statement Aug. 2.

Woodford continued, "Most Linux users are tired of having to reinstall every six 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 upgradable for two years without reinstallation of the OS."

The pre-beta is built on the 2.6.22 Linux kernel with a Debian Etch core. For its desktop interface, the new MEPIS uses KDE 3.5.7. For applications it includes 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 bootsplash 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 pre-beta has had very limited testing.

32- and 64-bit ISO images are available in the "testing" subdirectory at the MEPIS Subscriber's Site and at the MEPIS public mirrors. For immediate access to new releases, a user can become a MEPIS subscriber at the MEPIS store.