HOWTO: Install MEPIS 3.3.1 - FAILED: Locked up Laptop.
Mepis 3.3.1 was one of the most painless installs I have ever had with GNU/Linux. It asked me virtually nothing and installed pretty much flawlessly.
I ended up having some conflicts with my PCMCIA wireless NIC, but I think that was a rather isolated incident. I run a laptop and therefore tend to have more hardware problems than the average desktop user.
I ended up not using Mepis because of this conflict, but it still installed nicely and will probably work well for you. I took pictures of the install, but my camera bailed at the end and I lost them all. Therefore all we’re left with is this list of steps.
The list was written thinking that you would have pics to look at and may therefore seem kind of brief. Feel free to ask me questions to clarify…
Enjoy!
- Boot with MEPIS 3.3.1 CD in
- Log in as root with password root
- You can chose to boot with newer or older hardware. I chose newer
- I wanted my home directory on its own partition, so I ran QParted
I made the following partitions:
- hda1: /boot 100MB
- hda2: /swap 256MB
- hda3: home 10GB
- hda4: system 17.6GB
- Install GRUB in the MBR on system disck hda
- Selected ‘both’ kernels to use
- Created username Jon and password
- Set root password
- Set computer name (not usually necessary for home users) to jonzbox
- Set computer domain (again, not usually ncessary for home users) to jonzdomain
- Set SaMBa Server workgroup to jonzhouse
- Selected Guarddog firewall service to start and deselected everything else
- Confirmed keyboard to US layout and local to US
- Didn’t set clock - it was correct
- Finished - take out CD and reboot
Total time: 24 minutes
Checklist:
- Sound: Check
- Video: Check
- USB Stick: Check
- CDrom: Check
- Mouse: Check
- Keyboard: Check
- Wifi (using Linksys WPC11 v3 PCMCIA card): Nada!
Wifi:
- Started Mepis OS Center
- Set WEP password - no go
- Set config options in KDE Control center: no go
- Dropped to a terminal window and ran iwconfig - showed NO wireless extensions
- Tried my SMC2435W card - iwconfig picked it up
- Went back onto Mepid OS center and tried to bring up wlan0 - no go
- WEP password had been erased. Went back to ‘Wireless’ tab and entered it
- Clicked Start Wlan0 on Status tab - came up!
- Laptop locked up. This is soooo uncommon with GNU/Linux that it signals something very, very wrong
- Rebooted. All network settings lost. Reset them - no go
- Settings gone from Control Center Wireless netowork tab. Put them back and tried to restart Wlan0 - no go
- Laptop locked up again. Double-plus ungood. GNU/Linux is so stable that ANY distro that locks up isn’t going anywhere near my machine
MEPIS is Gonzo!
Onto Ubuntu 5.04….
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