Mepis and networking
A couple of nights ago, following some comments on here, I installed Mepis on the "Linux play PC", just to see if it's as good as folks have said.
It took under 30 minutes from "Start Installation" to "Running Mepis off the hard drive." That is very impressive, especially seeing as it's on a Pentium 800MHz old clunker. It found all my hardware except the SCSI drive: the SCSI card it found, but not the SCSI DVDROM. No big deal.
It goofed up the "multi-boot" Grub config that used to boot to Windows and the various other flavours of Linux - but that took under ten minutes to fix. Fortunately, I had copies of the old boot config file dotted about the various hard drives.
However, I just cannot get it to accept incoming network connections. Samba will connect from it to the other machines on the network with no problem, but there is no way it will allow those machines to access it. Since the machine's primary role is as a fileserver, that's a bit of a snag.
Fedora (the distro most used) networks fine, and did so from day 1. All the others do so, although I had fun with Debian - quite a long time ago: it may be easier to set up now.
But I cannot get Mepis to play. I'm a bit busy for the next few days, but will be having another dabble next week. If anyone who has got Mepis to work as a network server can tell me the trick, I'll be grateful. [I remember having to set up smbd -blahblah and nmbd -blahblah boot-up stuff in Debian a few years ago - might that be the answer here?]
The Midi player facilities don't work in Mepis either, but that's not exactly on the priorities list.