Nowadays, everyone uses Ubuntu, most people have used Fedora, and many folks have tried openSUSE. SimplyMEPIS ... not so many. That's a shame, because this relatively obscure Debian-based desktop distribution from Morgantown, WV, is an outstanding desktop operating system. With SimplyMEPIS 8 at beta 5 and closing in on release, I tested the distribution and found it to be a keeper.

I downloaded SimplyMEPIS from one of its mirror sites and burned the ISO file to a CD, then installed it on a Dell Inspiron 530s, powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800MHz front side bus, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 Graphics Media Accelerator.

On this system, I started by running SimplyMEPIS from its live CD. It ran without a hitch, so I moved on to installing the distribution. The SimplyMEPIS installation took approximately 15 minutes. I opted to use ext3 for my filesystem, rather than ext2 and ReiserFS; it's not the fastest or most up-to-date journaled file system, but it's about as stable as they come.

Like most modern Linuxes, SimplyMEPIS can use the entire hard dark for the distribution, or you can modify an existing partition table with GParted.

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