I decided to try installing Mepis again and was successful this time. However, there were problems.
First up was the problem with partitioning the drive. Previously, Xandros and Windows were installed on the disk and I decided to install over the Xandros partitions rather than formatting first and then deleting the partitions. This may have been a mistake as Mepis didn't seem to be able to figure out which paritions to use. So, when it came time to install Mepis, the install asked if I wanted to use the 'existing swap file or none'. Since I wanted to use the existing swap parition, I chose this option. Little did I know that even though the installer was offering what appeared to me to be two options, it was actually saying I would not have a swap file and none was created.
I am no expert in what swap files do (other than I think it is used when insufficient RAM is avaialble), I can only say not having a swap file is perhaps not a GoodThing(r). In any case, the install completed without obvious problems.
Soon after, I noticed the second problem. I could not access my USB Flash drive. Mepis simply would not mount it. A review of the Mepis support site indicated that I was not alone. There is page after page of people reporting problems with flash drives. I tried three different solutions offered on the support site and, unfortunately, none worked.
Perhaps related to this problem is intermittant access to the floppy drive and CD/DVD drive of the Dell Opltiplex GX-260 that I'm using. Neither drive can be reliably mounted. I don't know why they work sometimes and other times they don't. Even when they work, the reading of the data is sometimes corrupted (I didn't try writing as that would be tempting fate).
In trying to fix these problems, I noticed that dmesg was telling me of problems with the artsd daemon. There was page after page of the same error so apparently something is causing a recurring problem. What that is I don't know.
Lastly, Mepis doesn't automatically mount my Windows partitions. Although I can manually do so, I wonder why you wouldn't want this to occur. Perhaps this is related to my other problems with mounting the floppy, CD/DVD, and flash drives. But, in this case, I can reliably mount the parititions. Go figure.
In the end, I decided I won't be using Mepis, at least not at work (I'm still experimenting with it at home). For work, as mentioned earlier, I'm may try SUSE 10.1 sometime next week and perhaps Kubuntu next month (when Dapper flies). Until then, I'm back to Xandros. Sigh.
