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MEPIS has announced the release of beta 04 of ProMEPIS Linux, based on Linux kernel 2.6.10. The new kernel adds “many hardware and performance improvements, yet it comes at a price,” according to MEPIS developer Warren Woodford. What price?
“MEPIS was slow to introduce a newer kernel due to instabilities caused by restrictive policy and code changes introduced by the kernel team after 2.6.7,” Woodford says. “The changes have raised the bar for Linux distro developers, because it is necessary to recode some third party drivers and abandon others, including the unfortunate loss of the Philips WebCam driver.”
“[I] decided that 2.6.10 is about as good as its going to get, and we just have to workaround the remaining obstacles,” he continues. “Since the 2.6.10 kernel is very new, there was no win4lin patch at the time Beta 04 was released.” He expects the win4lin patch to be included in Release Candidate 1, which is scheduled in 2 weeks.
The latest MEPIS bootable CD is believed to be compatible with more hardware and there are improvements to the MEPIS OS Center that should eliminate some installation problems, according to Woodford. “The fglrx ATI driver can now be installed from the OS Center but this code needs to be improved.”