MEPIS has announced SimplyMEPIS 8.4.97, the fifth beta of MEPIS 8.5, now available from MEPIS and public mirrors. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.4.97-b5_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.4.97-b5_64.iso respectively. Deltas, requested by the MEPIS community, are also available.

Warren Woodford reported: "We are coming down the home stretch on the development of SimplyMEPIS version 8.5. There is some work to be done on MEPIS components, but the major packages are locked in to what may be their final versions. We've been asked to make more package updates, but we can't go much further without switching to a Debian Squeeze base."

Warren continued: "Currently, we have kernel 2.6.32.8, KDE 4.3.4, gtk 2.18.3-1, OpenOffice 3.1.1-12, Firefox 3.5.6-2, K3b 1.70.0-b1, Kdenlive 0.7.6, Synaptic 0.63.1, Gdebi 0.5.9, and bind9 9.6.1-P3. Available in the MEPIS pool, but not preloaded on the beta CD, we have Amarok 2.2.2-1, Shorewall 4.4.6, and quite a few updated specialty packages.