User Feedback :: dsl4+



Quote
One of MEPIS's drawbacks is...

Mepis (like Ubuntu and PCLOS) is intended to be installed after the live CD demonstrates that it works on your hardware.
Quote (lucky13 @ Jan. 27 2008,22:28)
Quote
One of MEPIS's drawbacks is...

Mepis (like Ubuntu and PCLOS) is intended to be installed after the live CD demonstrates that it works on your hardware.

Yeah, but by being diligent I have just spent two solid days enjoying running MEPIS as a LiveCD and doing "serious" (at least for me) programming in C. My sequence with MEPIS is (1) boot the LiveCD (2) at the boot prompt choose the "Load with Read/Write" option to make the file system fully writeable with the aufs module, also delete the splash screen option to avoid a bug in MEPIS that otherwise displays some garbage on your screen once you get into X (3) log in as user 'demo' (4) left-click on a system tray icon to mount my Windows drive (5) start an X-Terminal, go superuser and enter command 'dpkg -i /mnt/sda1/MEPIS/*.deb' to load up my extra needed compilation software (6) edit the xorg.conf file (with vi, usually) to change my DefaultDepth from 16 to 24 (single line change) (7) enter Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to cycle the X-server and now have depth 24 (8) optionally start Network Assistant, enter ESSID and WEP codes, stop network, start network to get internet access. I'll admit these 8 steps take about 4-5 minutes but then the system is ready for a full day's work as long as I don't exhaust my 2GB RAM with something stupid.

With the "full power" of about 2GB of software scrunched into the 677MB LiveCD I've managed to stumble on the Kate text editor that's C-language aware and quick. This now replaces my old clumsy 'vi' editor. I also found, just today, the Kdbg command that is a graphical interface to the gdb debugger. Great! While DSL3.4 does what I need on my old Toshiba 2515CDS 96MB-RAM 12GB-hard-drive 800x600 LCD machine for interfacing with my cameras on the road I'm finding MEPIS7.0, even as "only" a LiveCD, is a good fit on my much more powerful HP DV9005 laptop. Saving of my modified source programs is done to the Windows partition with manual 'cp' commands. Perhaps there's an automatic saving mechanism in MEPIS for all session modified files. Maybe I'll look for that if I start doing so much work I've forgotten what I've changed in the file system!

Different horses for different courses, as they say.

Tim
Tim, why are you not installing the distributions on your hard disks? Is there a particular reason for running "Live" versions instead of hard disk?
Quote
This now replaces my old clumsy 'vi' editor.

Kate versus vi flamewar? Never saw this coming. What's "clumsy" about vi?
Quote (danielp @ Jan. 31 2008,03:26)
Tim, why are you not installing the distributions on your hard disks? Is there a particular reason for running "Live" versions instead of hard disk?

On my Windows-XP laptop I didn't want to change the partitioning of my somewhat puny 90GB hard drive for three reasons. (1) I didn't want to fiddle with NTFS partitions with the same ease with which I've used Partition Magic on VFAT ones. (2) I really need all the space I can use in XP for my video file processing. (3) My 17-inch LCD laptop has a second bay for another hard drive and as soon as I get up the gumption I'm going to fill it with a second drive and install Linux there. Meanwhile the LiveCD concept seems workable. I'm a minimalist at heart!
Next Page...
original here.