Revisited: SimplyMEPIS 11.0

Before I start, there are two things I would like to say. The first is that this was meant to be posted in the middle of last week. However, that got thrown off with the Blogger outage, and after that I got really busy with studying for finals, and yesterday I was traveling back home from college, so today is the earliest that I've been able to post this at my leisure. The second is that I meant to write reviews of Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" based on opinions of one of my friends in college who is new to Linux but willing to try it out. However, we both got really busy and it never worked out. I managed to put most of my opinions of the new Unity interface in my review of Edubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal", so please refer to that if you want to get a quick idea of what I think of it.

Main Screen

A couple weeks ago, I tried out SimplyMEPIS 11.0. It didn't exactly work; Plymouth failed to load, and X/11 refused to start when I aborted Plymouth and logged in through the CLI. I went through the forums looking for similar issues and/or fixes and found nothing. I tried going on the MEPIS IRC channel but found myself the only person there. So I gave up and posted a rather negative review. Boy, did I get a lot of feedback on that review — in fact, that review has gotten the most comments out of any of my posts ever. Wow! But then, a lot of it was negative, saying that "it shouldn't be called a review", et cetera. There were a few helpful suggestions here and there, and one of them (which is apparently a tip suggested on the MEPIS forums, and somehow I missed that) was to add the line "xdrvr=intel confx" to the end of the first GRUB line for MEPIS.

Well, I tried that, and it worked! So I owe readers of this blog an apology for testing too late, getting frustrated too easily, and getting cranky and whiny too easily. I'll try not to do that again. With that in mind, follow the jump to read the review that I should have written the first time around.

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