I was stunned when I loaded the live DVD and found the most complete array of really working, codecs, dependencies, plugins and media players I have ever found. I have been able to defeat every system so far by trying to play Hindu hymns on bhaktisangeet.com, which not only uses real player, but a very fussy codec that even Mac and Windows struggled with for a while. Then I test out flash by playing MSNBC videos and You Tube. Then I buzz over KCSM.org and listen to music under Real Player, Windows and every other plugin/player/etc. After that, it's over to ABC News videos and even to SKY.FM internet radio MP3 streams, Windows Media Player streams and so on. And of course then over to OpenTopia to test webcams. And then the ultimate torture for any computer, webcamplaza.net with all the european axis cameras that are hostile even to ordinary Windows and Mac machines. Mepis had as high a percentage as any other Linux OS and any other Windows OS in terms of percentage of webcamplaza cameras, (and they're just all over the map, physically and technologically).

This makes me a little sad because I'd gotten used to a certain level of suffering with the multimedia problem. Well, this is the live CD, which comes with a fantastic array of other programs. And, to boot, K actually looks sharp on Mepis. It looks almost as sharp as an XFCE interface. (I'm really rooting for XFCE to break out one day.)

All this being said, tomorrow I've got to do a hard-install. Some really great live CDs can't duplicate their performance once the install takes place. But as of now it seems to have the multimedia array of Mint with the great underlying stability of Debian. (Debian, as an underlying system seems to be so incredibly stable. When I could find no great multimedia system, I always found I gravitated back to Debian. This really looks promising. By the way, Mepis even handled the keyboard choice and network choice. It just did it all. I just sat there. Only I had to figure out that the live CD password was "demo," but other than that, I'm really rockin' with this.