[nflug] SimplyMephis Questions

[Sam Stern]

Sam Stern wrote:
> Hi All,
<snip>
> 1) My SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Value edition is not recognized and thus not
> supported by Alsa (which oddly lists the sound card by name but the KDE test
> yields no sound or midi). Non SM fix: install OSS and be done with it.

oh, my do I feel silly. It turns out SimplyMephis is very debain -- it
keep the sound at level 40. I just had to turn it up (The sound blaster
is a very quiet card) using kmix. *sigh* it's often the little things
that seem to cause much gnashing of the teeth!

> 2) I make extensive use of NFS on my home network. I need a certain uid, and
> several certain gids on my default user. How do I do this with the ui? Non
> SM fix: passwd, shadow, groups and gshadow, fstab, and start the rpc and nfs
> server(s) at boot. 

I gave up and did it the Linux way just to get it working.

> 
> 
> The Bad:
> 1) I have a dual CPU system. The kernel installed is the single cpu system
> and Synaptic lists no entry of a smp kernel. None SM Fix: compile own kernel
> or install irqbalace and kernel-smp.

It seems that Simply Mephis is a tad silly. I had to "refesh" the
package cache and I found the needed package. It was a haslte to
manually add all other smp packages but I got it working.


> 
> The uncomfortable:
> 1) How do I install the non public ATI drivers so I get full acceleration
> and TV-IN on my ATI Radeon 9800 pro all-in-wonder card. Non SM Fix: DL it
> myself and install after disabling the Linux framebuffer device.
> 

This is a hidden setting it seems. One needs to start the Simply Mephis
X configuration program and flip about. The option is there to install
the ATI drivers.

> 
> The minor things in life
> 
> 1) The package manager lists no uninstalled software. Where are the repos or
> sources of other software?
> 

ACK. It's not smart enough to know when it's run for the first time in a
networked envrionment. I simply needed to refresh the package cache.

> 1) Guard Dog firewall is nice. As professional personal firewall QA person
> that's a complement. It could clearly be made simpler but hay, it's
the best
> Linux iptables front end I've seen in a long time.

I take this back. The firewall is brain dead. I drilled down to all the
places I needed so as to get nfs, portmap, ipp working. STill blocked. I
gave up and disabled it. I'll write my own firewall script.

> 4) Unlike the 4 hour grueling ordeal that is suse 10.2, SimplyMephis
> installed and booted in 20 minutes. Literally.
> 

OH, Simply Mephis seems to have it's own pain points. There is no "Linux
Developer" button to select the packages needed to install and compile
software. So I've spent several hours getting the packages installed
(and removed) so I can compile vmware desktop, various toys not in the
repo etc. At least the firefox version was current, the OpenOffice was
several versions old -- missing important new base and calc
functionality. Oh, well.


So far, SimplyMephis has been about average for a Linux Distro. It's
pretty but package managment needs allot of help (what if All I wanted
to do was load a few games? Even kde games were not installed! How can I
live without mahjong?), it did not autodetect my networked cups
printers, needed manual configuration to play on the network and
genrally caused more pain than needed. I even had to install ksysrc just
to find a way to start nfs, ftp and ssh server! Not good.

Next: The great cups / sane adventure, checking that at least FLASH and
acroread got installed, and other installing OpenOffice from the base
distro.
And perhaps later, the cedega shuffle begins!

Verdict in the making: Nothing better or worse than Suse -- just different.

Yours

Sam S.


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