| SimplyMEPIS 6.5 Beta 6 expands NVIDIA Beryl support |
Feb. 20, 2007
 SimplyMEPIS 6.5 Beta 6 is now available for downloading and testing, the project announced today. The new release allows users to optionally select between two NVIDIA drivers, the latest v1.0.9746 or a legacy version (v1.0.9631), to maximize Beryl support for both newer and older chips, the project said.
Beryl is a combined window manager and composite manager that uses OpenGL to provide acceleration. It is designed to be highly flexible, extensible, and portable, according to the Beryl Project website.
"Linux stands for user choice and freedom, so this latest build of SimplyMEPIS gives users the choice of using the NVIDIA 1.0.9746 driver out-of-the-box," said MEPIS founder and chief maintainer Warren Woodford. "This is not a default, it is an opt-in user choice. Anyone who wishes to use the NVIDIA driver is free to choose it. If you don't explicitly choose NVIDIA, the driver will lie dormant and unlinked in your running system."
Beryl itself, however, is not included in the current beta release. "I'm still working on the MEPIS integration of Beryl. I expect that very soon Beryl 0.2.0 will go final," Woodfrod said. "When that happens, we'll release an iso that includes Beryl."
The Beta 6 iso also uses the ntfs-3g driver for reading and writing NTFS partitions from user space, Woodford said. For those who want it, the new NVIDIA 1.0.9631 legacy driver may be installed from the MEPIS package pools. Hibernate support has been improved for laptops, he added.
During the past two months, MEPIS has recompiled newer versions of several packages to be compatible with SimplyMEPIS and Ubuntu 6.x. These packages are freely available in the MEPIS pools for MEPIS and Ubuntu users.
The latest 32- and 64-bit iso images of simplyMEPIS 6.5 beta 6 are available for download in the "testing" subdirectory at the MEPIS subscriber's site and at MEPIS public mirrors. Satisfied users are encouraged to make a contribution or make a purchase at the MEPIS store.
For details on other changes in SimplyMEPIS 6.5 so far, consult the related stories, below.
Related Stories:
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