A disclaimer in the beginning: I have been aware of (Simply)MEPIS since at least early 2005 when it used to be on the front and cover CD's of various magazines during that year but have never explored it. I like my Debian 'straight-up' or not at all, and, given that MEPIS is based on Debian stable and given how easy it is to add repositories to the sources list, I felt no need for anything else. Also, regular readers will know I'm not much of a fan of the bigger desktop environments lately, but as MEPIS comes with KDE 4 by default I will try not to let that bias my assessment. With that in mind, let's proceed.

I usually don't use the Hibernate function much, but lately I have been wondering why it was that my Arch installation did not resume from swap when my new Slackware 13.37 on the same laptop had no such problems.
Two things. I found I didn't actually have a swap partition in Arch as through some fooling around a while ago the UUID of the swap partition had changed, and Arch identifies partitions by this ID by default.

A while ago I read a question as to why there are so few live distributions around based on Slackware when compared to other systems.  The answer is simple: there aren't. You only need to follow this link to a query on distrowatch to see that there are actually quite a few around, and probably more that are not in the site's database. I'll go through a few here that are my personal top choices.

A short interview with Robby Workman, who is part of the informal team helping out with the development of Slackware Linux, on the release of Slackware 13.37 can be found on Slack World. I happen to think that it's a great release, very stable, and the 11 months invested were worth it. But then, I can't comment on the performance of KDE 4 because I usually do a custom install with Xfce, Window Maker, and this time also LXDE from ponce (see my article on setting up LXDE on Slackware further down).

A while ago we had a poll here and a review of Mageia came second just after Scientific Linux. Mageia is a new distribution and this is only the second beta, but it's due for release in around 30 days so I thought we'll take a sneak preview now. No doubt there will be more reviews coming all over the web once this is out.

Slackware 13.37 is out. So what do you do if you need or want a light weight desktop environment for an old machine and LXDE is your favorite? You could wait for Salix to catch up and release their own spin as they always do because they are fully compatible and you could just pull it in with slapt-get from their repos. You could build it yourself using the scripts at SlackBuilds.org, but they need a bit additional work and you need to figure out the build sequence.