MEPIS Releases Beta3 of SimplyMEPIS 6.0 with Many Fixes

MEPIS has released beta3 of SimplyMEPIS 6.0 with many fixes, including for international support. Laptop power management has been improved. Biometric pam authentication is included. New in this release, cpu speed management is enabled automatically. Suspend-to-ram is known to work out-of-the-box with some HP and Lenovo laptops--more testing is required.

A Bluetooth mouse can be enabled from the commandline, but the configuration UI is not yet available. More file associations are preconfigured, especially for graphics. Firefox was tweaked to have print and download buttons in the main toolbar. i18n support has been repaired. Languauge/keyboard selection works during CD boot and after installation. Translators are needed immediately, for the grub messages and help. If you would like to help, please contact erin@mepis.com.

Biometric pam authentication via the UPEK fingerprint reader available on some Lenovo laptops and as a separate USB device has been integrated for testing. GFTP has been reinstated on the SimplyMEPIS CD. The KDE menus have been further adjusted to make the most common apps easier to find. Kuickview was removed because it is no longer supported in the Ubuntu pools and showFoto was already available as an alternative. Konserve was replaced with Keep for local backups because it was very easy to lockup konserve. Bugs were fixed for MicroSolution CD drives and for old Thinkpads with Cirrus Logic sound.

A shortcoming in kde-systemsettings was worked around by making FileSharing a top-level function. There are about a hundred package updates in beta3 which was synchronized with the Ubuntu Dapper pools on May 12. All new MEPIS package updates are available from the MEPIS pool. Warren explains "About 75% of the packages that are pre-installed with SimplyMEPIS 6.0 come from the Ubuntu supported pool, that is the Dapper main pool. As they tweak packages for the final release of Dapper, we use some of those packages in MEPIS. Then our community of testers are encouraged to offer fixes and feedback that may improve those packages. ",