Warren Woodford has announced that SimplyMEPIS 8.4.96, the beta4 of MEPIS 8.5, is available from MEPIS and public mirrors. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.4.96-b4_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.4.96-b4_64.iso respectively. Deltas, requested by the community, are also available.

Warren said: "Even though the past 2 weeks were a holiday time, we have been busy. In this Beta I did a lot work on the look and feel of the KDE4 desktop. There have been many suggestions and contributions from the community, but in the end, someone had to make some decisions and integrate it all together. This took a lot of time. It isn't final, but I think it's very close."

He went on: "Otherwise, Firefox was updated to version 3.5.6-1 and OpenOffice was updated to version 3.1.1-12. The KDE compatibility module for OpenOffice was built for both KDE4 in the 8.5 pool, and KDE3 in the 8.0 pool. Initramfs-tool, grub-gfxboot, and klibc were updated to support booting from the ext4 filesystem, and installation on ext4 is supported in the latest mepis-installer, but for now this support is experimental."