SimplyMEPIS 12 Reaches Beta Quality

Warren Woodford announced this past weekend that development on SimplyMEPIS 12 has reached Beta quality and thus he has released a test image. This release brings some newer elements, but the announcement tells of the kibosh on two of them. With little else to go on, it was time for a boot.

The graphics of SimplyMEPIS 12 haven't changed since the alpha released last Fall. Some software version numbers have jumped, but some haven't. The Beta features Linux 3.8.2, Xorg X Server 1.12.4, GCC 4.7.2, and KDE 4.8.4. GRUB 2 is default, but UEFI and GPT drive support have been "deferred." Woodford said of that, "Unfortunately each hardware vendor is implementing the "standard" differently." The MEPIS tools look pretty much unchanged as well.

One early report says, "One problem, already existing in the alphas, remains unsolved. Virtualbox simply creates sda and the Mepis 12 installer therefore fails." Another is reporting an issue with his scanner. Others are reporting performance issues on low resource machines. But one enthusiast known as Jerry3904 reported on KDE issues:

--Akonadi is not set up, so system hangs if you click on Information Sources
--Nepomuk not fully installed, so Desktop Search fails
--Desktop Effects caused my system to just hang with side diagonal lines

Oh well, that's what betas are for. You can test it out by visiting www.mepis.org.