Morgantown, WV, January 8, 2005: Warren has announced the release of Beta 04 of ProMEPIS Linux. It is available for test and evaluation at the usual mirror sites and from the MEPIS premium FTP site. A big change is the introduction of kernel 2.6.10, replacing the older kernel 2.6.7. The new kernel has many hardware and performance improvements, yet it comes at a 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. 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. See: http://www.smcc.demon.nl/webcam/

Warren has decided that 2.6.10 is about as good as it's going to get, and we just have to workaround the remaining obstacles. Since the 2.6.10 kernel is very new, there was no win4lin patch at the time Beta 04 was released. It is expected that the win4lin patch will be included in Release Candidate 1.

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. The fglrx ATI driver can now be installed from the OS Center but this code needs to be improved.

Skype has been updated. The ivtv driver has been tested with a PVR-350 card and a vanilla installation of Pro Beta 04, but the ivtv utilities have not yet been packaged with MEPIS. A typo was corrected that affected automatic loading of the C-Media ALSA driver.

The standalone slamr driver is no longer compatible with standard kernels. MEPIS is now using the ALSA Project version of the driver which seems to work well.

ProMEPIS is scheduled for final release in late January or early February 2005.