SimplyMepis is a Debian-based distro developed by Warren Woodford who believed that Mandrake Linux was too hard for new users. (Mandrake, now Mandriva, was the Ubuntu of its time). I’ve heard him interviewed a few times on The Linux Link Tech Show and he seems to be of the realist (as opposed to idealist) school of Linux distro maintainers. He believes users should be able to listen to MP3s, use Adobe Flash, and so on. SimplyMepis 8.0 is based on Debian 5 stable, which I recently reviewed. So let’s load her up into VirtualBox and see how it goes.

Based on previous experiences, I chose to load the SimplyMepis Failsafe version off the LXF DVD. The usual kernel messages went by as my hard drive and other components were discovered. This took quite a long time, but I am running it in a virtual machine. Eventually, the KDM screen loaded up.