MX Linux Forum

Well this is amazing! I emailed Warren for permission (!) to use the Mepis logo on an Xfce version, and got this response:

Hi Jerry,

That's cool. I'm glad you're doing it.

Let me know if you want me to host the ISOs or roll it into M12.

Whatever you want to do is fine with me.

Best,

Warren

I will be working with the Development Team on this starting in January, and if anyone else would like to be involved, p[lease PM me, telling me what area you are interested in working on.

Woot!

Congratulations!

Wanna help?! Huh, huh?

Have fun. Personally, I'd rather see an M12/13/14 final.

Whatever...just trying to work with what we have.

Jerry3904 wrote:Wanna help?! Huh, huh?

I'd love to... but I doubt I can do anything useful.

Jerry3904 wrote:Whatever...just trying to work with what we have.

Are you saying that a final version will not be forthcoming anytime soon? Not that there is anything wrong with M11 but, I have been anticipating the newer Mepis. Just wish I knew enough to help out.

Are you saying that a final version will not be forthcoming anytime soon?

See this post for our current understanding. A number of us have been running M12 B2 for many months, some as a production machine, with no problem whatsoever, so I would recommend that you consider that option.

The help I will need for this official Mepis Xfce lies in finding people who will look rigorously at the development versions as we progress--testing that everything works, judging the look, asking themselves about what is necessary and not, etc. Takes no specialized knowledge, just commitment.

I have time, a spare desktop and an older laptop, and a small amount of experience in using Xfce, so would be happy to help with testing from a potential end-user situation.

Chris

Build it and they will come. I am in for testing it.

Both on my list!

Little I can do to help develop, but I have Run Majaro Xfce on and off, so will be delighted to try it on one or more computers. Sorry all desktops however...

JR

[quote="Jerry3904"

The help I will need for this official Mepis Xfce lies in finding people who will look rigorously at the development versions as we progress--testing that everything works, judging the look, asking themselves about what is necessary and not, etc. Takes no specialized knowledge, just commitment.[/quote]

Count me in, please!

Jerry3904 wrote:
The help I will need for this official Mepis Xfce lies in finding people who will look rigorously at the development versions as we progress--testing that everything works, judging the look, asking themselves about what is necessary and not, etc. Takes no specialized knowledge, just commitment.

I do have some time for the colder months and a laptop, that I am looking for some distro to put on. Count me in and I'll do what I can.

Jerry3904 wrote:The help I will need for this official Mepis Xfce lies in finding people who will look rigorously at the development versions as we progress--testing that everything works, judging the look, asking themselves about what is necessary and not, etc. Takes no specialized knowledge, just commitment.

You can add my name - I need to change the OS on my Aspire One netbook and this is an interesting option. I will have to wander up to the free wi-fi at the local pub to test that, but that's no hardship. I can hardly use their wi-fi without buying a pint!

I would like to contribute further, but I have limited skills and will be out of action for a while in the New Year for a revision of my hip joint.

Phil

That's great, thanks! Some of my best review work has been accompanied by a pint...

The help I will need for this official Mepis Xfce lies in finding people who will look rigorously at the development versions as we progress--testing that everything works, judging the look, asking themselves about what is necessary and not, etc. Takes no specialized knowledge, just commitment.

Happy to help review. FWIW, I just installed Xfce on a stock version of Debian and have been headed in a more minimal direction anyway...using Crunchbang for production at the moment.

Just a quick comment on file mirrors that may also apply more generally.

Australia, ISP Bigpond (and others perhaps) allows unmetered downloads from:

http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/

currently offering links to (cut/paste):

Firefox & Thunderbird Linux Mint Centos VideoLAN
CPAN/Perl TED Talks Kernel.Org Sage Mathematics
Fedora openSUSE Raspbian Ubuntu
FreeBSD MacPorts Project NetBSD OpenBSD


Not sure how hard it would be to have them host content but something to consider perhaps.

Good luck with development, am yet to try M12.

kindly

Mick

I don't worry too much about big file uploads since Google Drive went up to 15 GB for free.

pcallahan80 wrote:

The help I will need for this official Mepis Xfce lies in finding people who will look rigorously at the development versions as we progress--testing that everything works, judging the look, asking themselves about what is necessary and not, etc. Takes no specialized knowledge, just commitment.

Happy to help review. FWIW, I just installed Xfce on a stock version of Debian and have been headed in a more minimal direction anyway...using Crunchbang for production at the moment.

I can't promise commitment or a rigorous look at the development versions. However, I've added Xfce to Mepis (and other distros) quite a few times, and I ran a Debian-based Xfce distro, SalineOS, for well over a year here. I run Wheezy Xfce on my "primary" computer, and I also use Xfce in Bridge Linux and Arch. So I'll try things out as things progress, and maybe I can be of some help. I think that a Mepis Xfce spin is a great idea. Anyway, I'm very curious to see how Mepis Xfce might differ from Wheezy Xfce.

Let me know what you need done. I have installed M11.9.92 on the laptop and downloaded xfce from the synaptic. Not sure where to go from here.

Nothing for now, but I will be posting an ISO in about 2 weeks for you to test.

Thanks

The reason for the "blank check" is because Mepis is dead.
I have a lot of fond memories with MEPIS as it was the first version of Linux that I really grabbed on to and the MEPIS community was so strong.

But it became apparant that Warren does not know how to delegate tasks and demanded too much control. The results were bad decisions (going from a Debian base to the ill-fated Ubuntu base, then moving back to Debian, etc...) and an OS that simply did not keep up.

Waiting for Warren got old, so moved to Mint and have never regretted it.
It's a real shame that the power of the MEPIS community was wasted because Warren didn't know how to or want to delegate.

Now it's a dead distro.

I was just wondering what, if anything was going on and it feels like a morgue when on the front page of the website Warren's message was from a year and a half ago.

(gulp!)

Don't expect a comeback ladies and gents.

Good luck. I'm glad i moved on years ago instead of waiting for nothing more than a slow, agonizing death.

What a stupid and self-serving post. Can't tell you how glad we are too that you moved on!

sunworks wrote:I have a lot of fond memories with MEPIS as it was the first version of Linux that I really grabbed on to and the MEPIS community was so strong.

I had a great run with MEPIS, and I sure am glad it was out there when I was getting going with Linux. Helped me quite a bit in becoming comfortable with Debian and other Debian-based distros. Nothing lasts forever, but Warren's work sure did benefit a lot of people, including me.

sunworks wrote:so moved to Mint

I think that Linux Mint is a wonderful distro. There were a few things about it that I was less than thrilled about, so I stopped using it after Mint 9 ("Isadora"). But a friend of mine is interested in Linux; she hasn't asked for my advice, but if she does, Mint will probably be the first distro I'll mention.

malspa wrote:I think that Linux Mint is a wonderful distro. There were a few things about it that I was less than thrilled about, so I stopped using it after Mint 9 ("Isadora"). But a friend of mine is interested in Linux; she hasn't asked for my advice, but if she does, Mint will probably be the first distro I'll mention.

Mint KDE LTS is what I've used most recently for those I've switched over to Linux, and it's been a complete success for those users. I rarely hear from them, and when I do I'm told that all is good. I once heard from one user after she'd had a visitor using her computer and for whatever reason this visitor had set Firefox to it's defaults. Since everything "looked different" and her Gmail and Facebook tabs weren't there any longer the user thought something had broken.

I'm looking forward to the release of Mint KDE LTS v17.

For my personal use, good ol' MEPIS 11 does everything I want. When the time comes, I'll be looking at direct Debian derivatives such as SolydK or perhaps MX with KDE. If the latter, joany is gonna get a workout.

I am so glad Sunworks doesn't appreciate Warren having a life.

Whine about it when a thread is long dead yes, but offer some help, no.

I have one word for people who behave like this: bye.

Funny how people are so entitled and demanding, like Warren owes them something. Warren gave me and to thousands of Linux users something valuable, basically for free (I donated money and my time, but that's not something that anybody had to do), instead of saying 'thanks' people come here to bitch. Nice...

malspa wrote:I had a great run with MEPIS, and I sure am glad it was out there when I was getting going with Linux. Helped me quite a bit in becoming comfortable with Debian and other Debian-based distros. Nothing lasts forever, but Warren's work sure did benefit a lot of people, including me.

Ditto!

Adrian wrote:Funny how people are so entitled and demanding, like Warren owes them something. Warren gave me and to thousands of Linux users something valuable, basically for free (I donated money and my time, but that's not something that anybody had to do), instead of saying 'thanks' people come here to bitch. Nice...

I feel the same way, but am also disappointed at how things transpired. It wasn't handled well, essentially abandoning MEPIS in the middle of a development cycle. I'm convinced the challenges of UEFI and inSecure Boot proved insurmountable to him, and he just flat gave up. He should have taken what he had, fleshed it out and tidied it up and applied the usual MEPIS Magic, then announced he was done. PR has never been one of his strong suits.

DBeckett wrote:Duplicate post. How's that happen?

PEBKAC

After two attempts to post hung up, I got an error message about "site resources exceeded" or some such thing. Seems fine now.

uncle mark wrote:PR has never been one of his strong suits.

Agreed. And I would have liked if he would have popped in at the forums, posted a "sticky" or two, and just been more open to communicating his thoughts here. Just wasn't the way he decided to operate, I guess.

malspa wrote:

uncle mark wrote:PR has never been one of his strong suits.

Agreed. And I would have liked if he would have popped in at the forums, posted a "sticky" or two, and just been more open to communicating his thoughts here. Just wasn't the way he decided to operate, I guess.

More his nature than a conscious decision.

Everyone here should be grateful for what Warren has given us, particularly in the early stages of Mepis history. He stated numerous times he decided to build it initially for his own use being dissatisfied with what was available at the time. Over the years Linux has matured as have numerous distributions. The ease of use that Warren championed has been woven into many distros in their own fashion. It becomes more difficult to stand out and provide unique advantages.

I cannot read his mind, but possibly those factors dampened his motivation along with the oft stated reason of his needing to make a living.

Sour grapes are completely unnecessary, and anyone is welcome to stay or leave for whatever reason. In fact it is better for all of us if disgruntled members do move on. Many members have, but have done so graciously and still have a presence here.

Warren kept at it for a long time; we've seen others come and go. It would be great if MX lasts as long as MEPIS has, but keeping a distro going like that seems like a tough thing to do. You kinda get to a point where you appreciate what's out there right now, and you use it if it works out for you, but you understand that a distro's dev(s) could decide to move on at any time.