Mepis 11 Beta 2: A Step Closer!!

I downloaded the second Beta Release of SimplyMEPIS 11.

Since I'm nowhere near a Linux guru, I played along with the default booting option from the menu. "I'll choose another one later if this doesn't work," I said to myself.

It booted fine. Soon after boot, I was watching "Underwater," Mepis 11's elegant and beautiful desktop wallpaper.

Sound was working...nice! What about my wired connection?

Yay! That was working fine as well! I played a bit with Firefox 4beta before getting serious again.

Alright...what was next? Right! Unfortunately, Mepis 8.0 did not handle my DVD drives well. K3B refused to burn...and so did other burning applications I tested. I quickly slid a blank CD into my free drive, opened K3B, chose a couple of files to burn (well, I actually stuffed all the CD and left almost no free room with my files...but that was for the sake of science!), and off I went! K3B did its job in about 2 minutes. GREAT!

Mepis 11 mounted all my Linux partitions, too. It refused to show me my XP storeroom, but I could see its contents using Dolphin as Su.

The only problem I found was the desktop effects. No matter what I did, I could not get Plasma to give me its eye candy. Well, being myself used to KDE 3, I guess I will be able to live without them while I find a solution--if that issue is not solved when Mepis goes final, of course. After all, my little netbook, the one I use for my presentations and classes, has Mepis 8.5 and Plasma runs fine on it. I can have all the eye candy I want with my netbook.

Well...time to get bold! As I did with Pardus 2011 RC, I installed Mepis 11 Beta 2 on my desktop PC!

The installation took me just 8 minutes and that was because I took all the time I wanted to read through each screen before hitting "next".

Finished the installation, I took out the Live DVD, rebooted my computer and...

CRASH!!!

No, there were no crashes at all. Too bad for you if you expected one! Mepis 11 Beta 2 handled my other partitions quite well (I had to manually adjust GRUB to see Pardus 2011, but I could see Mepis 8.0, Mandriva One 2010.2, and Galpon MiniNO. Oh, XP was also there.

Definitely, Mepis 11 took a step closer to becoming final. I can see it: each test release is more solid than the previous. Indeed, many of the issues that the Alphas and the previous Beta presented seem to be gone now...at least in my case.