Morgantown, WV, Feb 13, 2007 — Warren has announced Beta5 of SimplyMEPIS 32 and 64. Xorg 7.1 and lots of new drivers make this release Beryl-ready.
Warren Woodford of MEPIS reports “I thought we were almost done when everything lined up, all at once, for us to make this leap forward. The changes are so profound that I’ve revised the version number to 6.5. A 6.0 user can still upgrade fully to the new release and SimplyMEPIS still relies 80% on Dapper packages, but the rest are now provided by MEPIS amd maintained by MEPIS. During the coming week we will be integrating Beryl to work the MEPIS way. Users will have the option of running Beryl or not.”
Beta 5 adds Xorg 7.1, NVidia driver 1.0.9746, fglrx driver 8.31.5, and madwifi-ng 0.92. In addition there are updated lan drivers for E1000, forcedeth, and tg3. Support for Jmicron on Asus motherboards has been verified and works with a BIOS config change and a provided boot option. An update of wireless packages has greatly improve reliability of wireless connections with networkmanager. Boot time options now include explicitly setting the monitor vertical frequency if needed. And if that isn’t enough Sun Java 6 is included.
The MEPIS package pools have been renamed to reflect the name change of the release. The new release pools are mepis32-6.5 and mepis64-6.5. Users of 32 bit SimplyMEPIS should also continue to enable the simply32-6.0 pool. Users are also reminded to disable the Ubuntu restricted pools, since they contain kernel updates that are not MEPIS compatible.
Warren says “I’ll be working on the MEPIS integration of Beryl. The Beryl packages will be available in the MEPIS pools tomorrow. I encourage everyone to test Beryl right away for basic functionality. If you want Beryl to work well with KDE, you need to pitch in and at least test it and report problems to the Beryl Project. They can use your help. With a little luck, the final release of 6.5 will be on February 24.”
The latest ISO images are available for download in the ‘testing’ subdirectory at the MEPIS Subscriber’s Site and at MEPIS public mirrors. Satisfied users are encouraged to make a contribution or make a purchase at the MEPIS store. Your support helps offset the costs of producing this MEPIS release and funds further development of MEPIS Linux.
About MEPIS
MEPIS LLC was founded in 2002 by computer industry veteran Warren Woodford, to realize his personal vision for a version of Linux that was complete and secure, while also being easy to try, easy to install, and easy to use. Today MEPIS offers personal computing solutions that are popular with people of all ages and of all professions. MEPIS products are also available free of charge to not-for-profits, K-12 schools, and private users not requiring support.

Link: http://www.mepis.org/node/12677

This week FSF Europe (FSFE) announced the release of its Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA), a form of copyright assignment in which a free software project can place its collective copyright under the control of a single organization or trustee. The agreement is designed to reduce the problems in managing copyrights in large projects, and to reconcile differences in copyright worldwide. However, exactly how important, useful, or necessary the FLA is depends upon whom you talk to in the free software community. To some extent, FSFE even seems to be operating contrary to the advice of the original Free Software Foundation in the United States.

Source: FSFE’s Fiduciary License Agreement is no panacea

This Recipe will tell you how to install and optimize VMware Server, a software virtual machine emulator that lets you run Linux and one or more other operating systems at the same time, each in a separate window. In most cases this means Windows, though other OSes can be run as well.

Source: How To Run Windows And Linux On A Single System

Red Hat is losing a key executive who joined the company last year as part of a major acquisition — Marc Fleury, who is resigning immediately to pursue personal interests. Fleury is the founder of JBoss, a smaller rival that Red Hat bought for $350 million in June to expand its capability in the middleware arena. Middleware is computer software used to integrate various applications. Fleury, who founded JBoss, has been on paternity leave since December, and was widely speculated to step down.

Source: JBoss Founder Resigns From Red Hat

Linux users are blessed, or perhaps cursed, with a wide array of choices for software installation and management — better known as packaging tools. Over the next few days, we’re going to look at some of the packaging options for Linux to provide a…

Source: Packaging special report

Java developers have been moving from the full Java Platform, Enterprise Edition to lightweight frameworks, yet not even the lightest has the simplicity of Ruby on Rails. Now, the JRuby interpreter can tie Rails together with the power, breadth, and industry acceptance of the JVM, Java libraries, and application servers.

Source: JRuby on Rails: The power of Java, the simplicity of Ruby on Rails