New /boot/grub/menu.lst for Linux on usb-HDD

Because I had to delete ALL of my internal HDD because of an unrepairable problem in OS X, my precious menu.lst that handled, besides 4 Linux OSes on the internal drive, a further 6 installed on my usb drive.
Today I got three of them back, updated and generally tidied up to make them usable again. The three I got were Pclos, Fedora 9 and Mepis. Few if any problems were encountered other than the fact that the first two (Pclos and Fedora insist on calling the drive on the usb HDD /dev/sdax rather than the expected /dev/sdbx.

Mepis still improving

Sunday morning, when I booted to Mepis 7.0, the wireless started all by itself (just asking for kWllaet password). Since then, in about 5-7 reboots, the same thing has always happened so I think we can say that this problem is solved.
However, I still can't figure out why it didn't work like that on Saturday night when I made the changes to /etc/network/interfaces.
Actually, it might be worth while making the same change in /etc/network/interfaces on Sabayon as this one still won't start wireless by itself.
Basically everything going well in M7 with only 2.4GB in / and less than 0.5GB in /home. I'm thinking about putting this on Killians old computer as it's light and should be fast in spite of his very slow PIII 550MHz processor.
The only unresolved problem with Mepis is the fact that if I rotate the CF cube, the whole computer freezes. I haven't got any replies from anybody in a number of postings on this. So it seems it's not a common problem.
All-in-all, there's a lot to like about Mepis.

Wireless in Mepis 7.0

Today I finally got wireless working in Mepis 7.0 and it really wasn't that difficult.
According to Synaptic, Mepis already had madwifi 0.9.3.2 installed but this simply didn't work.
Then I downloaded and compiled 0.9.3.3 but that too didn't work.
Actually at this point i noticed that lspci didn't id the Atheros wireless card correctly and I posted to the mepis forums on this.
All I had to do to rectify this was to type "update pciids" (as root) and that got it right.
Unfortunateley, that didn't fix the problem.
So I downloaded and compiled the svn trunk madwifi and this worked perfectly, first time.
However, kNetworkmanager still wasn't picking up any devices at all so this meant that I had to go through quite a rigmarole in a terminal to get ath0 to connect afetr every boot.
To get the knm-applet to work better I had to take EVERYTHING out of /etc/network/interfaces and just replace this with

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

Now, knetworkmanager sees the devices but i still have to pick the one I want, enter the wallet password and then it connects.
This is exactly what happens in Sabayon which is also kde.
In the Gnome-based OSes, wireless connects directly at boot with no intervention from me.
Nevertheless, this is a major advance.
Actually, I'm very impressed with Mepis and the only problem I have is that I can't rotate the CF cube. Strangely, I can't get anybody to even reply to me on this problem which usually suggests it's not a widspread problem.

Further progress on Mepis 7.0

Mepis 7.0 is working fine without any problems other than the freeze that happens when I try to rotate the CF cube. So now I have disabled this.
Nobody replying to my posts on this.
However, did see this thread in MepisLovers forum where some guy complained of a similar (but nowhere near the same) problem with Beryl and M7. He re-installed and whatever problem he had went away. I may have to do something like this.
Today I got sound working (no more than unmute verything in alsamixer. However, these settings seemed to be overwritten at every boot meaning that I had to reset alsamixer again to get sound to work). I posted to the Mepis forums and got some help. It seems that perhaps kmix is what was overwriting my sound settings. So (and this is only a tentative explanation) it seems that launching kmix once the alsamixer settings have been optimised, copies those settings to kmix which means it doesn't overwrite the sound settings anymore.
Also got video working in Opera. It seems my problem was that I was using Opera 9.25 which won't work with the latest flash (9.0.115). As I couldn't get an earlier version, I just upgraded to 9.50 build 1772 and this works fine with the latest flash. A lot of useful info about the use of flash in Opera came out of this thread.
Some guy put a package together for AWN in Mepis and was looking for testers. I volunteered and it looked pretty good although I couldn't do a full test as AWN was already fully installed on my system. However, if I get around to installing CF and AWN on Killian's computer (9 years old), I'll certainly use this method over the first one which was very amateurish.

Problems putting new repo into Synaptic in Mepis

I have used Synaptic in various distros (notably Ubuntu) over the last two years and never had any serious issue getting a new repo accepted.
However, in M7, I had major problems here in that whenever I added the repo, any repo, to /etc/apt/sources.list I would inevitably get an error message once I had opened synaptic again (look here in the Mepis forum where more detail is provided).
In the end, it turns out that in Mepis you need to just put up with that error message and then hit Reload or apt-get update which will rectify things.

MEPIS freezing when rotate cube

This freezing problem has persisted throughout the day until I eventually had to shut-off Rotate Cube in ccsm (basically to help me avoid the temptation to rotate the cube). After that it worked without problem for the last 6 hours.
I found, before this, that if I shutdown AWN, I could vigorously for about 30 seconds before it froze.
Posted on MepisLovers forum but nobody seems to be able to advise on this.Have now posted to Compiz Community Forums.
However, in googling around this freezing problem with CF is not unknown although no fix is prescribed. Loose Binding is mentioned as a possible fix but when I tried this it really messed up a lot of things on the screen -- for example Yakuake didn't open and I couldn't write to a terminal window.
Another possibility is to use some boot parameters such as noapic but I haven't tried any of these yet.

Progress on Mepis

Made a lot of progress in getting Mepis 7.0 up to shape today. So, I got CompizFusion-Icon up and running using this post #7 here although it was a bit of a gambiarra.
In particular, I had some problems with some of the dependencies mentioned were not available in the Mepis repos.
Nevertheless, it did work fine but only after I made some changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf as outlined here for AIGLX compositor and (as I have very often found in Linux) after a reboot.
Also of importance in getting things to work properly was getting fusion-icon to autostart on boot (see here for howto).
Nevertheless, after I had gotten AWN working, then when I started to rotate the cube, the whole computer would freeze and the only way to unfreeze it was to shut it down completely. I don't know why this is happening but will certainly investigate.

AWN is also working well using this (somewhat half-assed) guide. The two avant-window-navigator tarballs I got from this chinese site . Also, the AWN applets don't show up in the AWN-manager because of missing dependencies, but you can get all of the dependencies here. (see debian-based distros including Ubuntu).

Still have to get wireless working so that's the next big challenge.

Installing Mepis 7.0 on MacBook

OK, today I put Mepis 7.0on my Seagate 250GB usb HDD which is currently hooked up to the MacBook.
One thing I had forgotten about Mepis is that they seem to prefer to boot it WITHOUT the initrd kernel file. However, you are asked to choose if you want initrd or not during the installation. Nevertheless, initrd is claimed to be only for experts so that most people would shy away from it.
However, when I did try to boot to Mepis from the MacBook, I almost immediately got a kernel panic.
I figured the only thing that could be wrong was the lack of initrd (I've never booted to an OS on a usb HDD without initrd) so I re-installed Mepis and this time asked for initrd booting.
So then I included initrd.img-2.6.22.xxx-mepis along with the vmlinuz equivalent in /boot/mepis/ on the Ubuntu partition on the Mac internal HDD and changed the /boot/grub/menu.lst to look like this:

title MEPIS at sdb7, kernel 2.6.22-1-mepis-smp
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/mepis/vmlinuz-2.6.22-1-mepis-smp root=/dev/sdb7 nomce quiet splash vga=791 resume=/dev/sdb1
initrd /boot/mepis/initrd.img-2.6.22-1-mepis-smp
boot

This booted fine with no problems.
Its interesting that Mepis seem to want to simplify the boot process by specifying a "variable" vmlinuz which might me the "latest" or the "previous" kernel version. This is presumably to allow people to select one or the other which would then be automatically updated without them having to do anything.
Nevertheless, I chose the "older" method of using a specific vmlinuz together with a specific (and, of course, matching) initrd.img.

As usual, when I start with a new OS arrangement, I need time to overcome the inevitable problems with wireless, desktop effects and maybe sound and video.
I haven't gotten around to even looking at any of these on Mepis as I'm amazingly having a problem with wired Internet connection.
At first, the wired was there and I could browse without problems.
Then I messed around with MEPIS Network Assistant to try to set my static DNS requirements and to try to get wireless setup. However, almost immediately after doing this, I could no longer browse - just getting Remote server unreachable errors. Despite this, I can still ping. So this is very weird but I remember having a similar problem before on some other OS but can't remember any of the details. I think it may have been a kind of DNS problem.
Anyway, I've posted on the MepisLovers forum and some people are helping me. If I can't get this solved I'm going to re-install Mepis tomorrow.