SimplyMEPIS was, believe it or not, my main distribution back in 2005 (around version 3.3). I even convinced my parents to ditch the 'Doze and installed SimplyMEPIS on their PC and they used it with minimal complaints for a number of years (actually, longer than I expected them to). Then I moved away from Mepis and never returned - until now (/dramatic music). In the quest to find an ideal gaming machine I thought I'd give it a chance, even though it's in an early development stage. I'll forgive crashes and strange occurrences, just so long as I can get gaming with the latest and greatest. Burning a copy of the 64bit Beta 2 (SimplyMEPIS-CD_7.9.80-beta_64.iso) I

SimplyMEPIS 8.0 Beta 2 is backed by the Debian Lenny core and is packing kernel 2.6.26, OpenOffice 3.0 RC2 and KDE 3.5.9. Sounds good and stable (the other main distros have already switched to 2.6.27rcX and KDE 4.1.x). After my experiences with KDE 4 I'm actually relieved to see KDE 3.5 again. Yes it now looks a tad dated but it does feel like home. Things work, the style is consistent and navigation is easy.

First boot was quick and painless and apart from my monitor and native resolution not being detected, everything looked good for the first boot into the system. I awaited a pop up to let me know of any updates but this didn't come so instead I set about enabling the Nvidia proprietary drivers. Using the MEPIS-Windows Assistant I selected the nvidia drivers and kicked off the download.

After the Nvidia drivers were installed, I was requested to reboot. No harm in that, what could possibly go wrong? Well, a lot it seems.

Rest Here