Archive for June, 2010

Hello Peppermint users World Wide,

We are just barely 1 month old and we are exploding. In this short amount of time we are on the verge of serving our 250,000′th download from our servers and we have no way to detect or determine the number of those with Peppermint via Bit Torrents. It is simply amazing and we want to thank you all for your enthusiasm and support.

Due to this high volume of downloads and traffic, this morning we received a very kind but strict warning that we have flooded the server that we are sharing and have 24 Hours to move to a dedicated server. This is super exciting news !! However, we need your help today to make that happen.  If everyone who downloaded Peppermint this month pitched in $1 we would have enough to hire staff and move into an office. In the grand scheme of things $1 is about 1/200th of the cost of Windows and probably 3x that for Mac OS….

Please give us a hand today to get into that dedicated server. Buy a CD, a T-shirt, or go to the sponsorship page and donate $1. Every little bit helps.

Thanks to all those who have already done their part by donating, buying a CD, hosting Torrents and Mirroring our ISO’s. We really appreciate all the support.

In Other News:

Well, the cat is already out of the bag and most of you know what is coming down the pipe next. But for those of you that don’t, Team Peppermint is about to make another release called: Peppermint Ice.  Here’s an excerpt of a statement that Kendall Weaver made for the Distrowatch interview that appeared this week:

“In the near future we’ll be releasing Peppermint Ice.  It will feature Chromium as the default browser and will likely be even more cloud focused as we’ll likely drop printer and scanner support for it and replace more of the default applications with either smaller ones or cloud based alternatives. Once we launch Peppermint Ice we will be working towards bringing integration with Google Cloud Print as the next logical step in development for Ice and all other Peppermint versions. Essentially, we were finding a large group of people who were experimenting with the combo of Peppermint and Chromium and getting great results. We listened to these skilled users of ours on the forum, picked their brains a little, and now we can offer Peppermint Ice as a crowd sourced product..”

What is Ice?

If you are currently using Peppermint One then you have already been exposed and are using Prism. If you haven’t, then let us take a second and explain what Ice is.

Ice is, by definition, a Site Specific Browser [SSB] that Peppermint creator Kendall Weaver wrote himself as a means to launch Web Applications and/or  Cloud Applications [SaaS - Software As A Service] from the new Peppermint Ice OS. When you launch a web based application using Ice it will call up a custom SSB using the default Chromium Browser. So, essentially, the Ice SSB acts as software that is installed locally but is actually delivered via the Web.

The difference in using an SSB as opposed to using a tabbed browser is that only one function is assigned to the Ice SSB.  In a tabbed browsing system, with several open for example, if one service or site in any given tab crashes you run the risk of losing data by crashing the other tabs and potentially the browser itself. since an SSB is isolated and dedicated to only operating the web application of your choice, if it crashes or hangs, it does not effect the rest of the system. And, because the Ice SSB’s are so sleek, they are perfect for running apps that display better using the most screen area as possible.

Look for Peppermint Ice OS soon ! We hope to launch a public release in the next 2 weeks and that date is still To Be Determined as we apply some last minute polish….

Again, if you love Peppermint and can assist us with getting into a dedicated server in the next 24 hours, any and all donations are deeply appreciated.

Kindest Regards – Team Peppermint

The

We’re proud to offer the second official Peppermint OS respin, featuring a fully updated system as of June 17 and a few other things including bug fixes and new features.  Like any of our version respins, there’s no reason to reinstall unless you just want to, the version you already have installed is being automatically updated over time.

Here are some of the highlights this time around:

Peppermint-One-06172010

• All Xfce applications and dependencies have been removed.  In an effort to keep Peppermint light and modular, we’ve decided to start cutting out dependencies on other desktops as much as possible.  This time around we pulled all of Xfce out.  Applications from Xfce such as the Task Manager and the screenshot app have been replaced with more modular ones.
• The notifications are prettier.  We first released Peppermint with the old notification-daemon running.  Unfortunately it’s very ugly so we pulled it out in favor of notify-osd.
• We’ve gotten rid of pyneighborhood.  Basically the presence of this application seemed to cause more confusion than network sharing so we opted to drop it entirely.  The file manager is gaining better support for network shares so in the near future apps like pyneighborhood will no longer have a place in Peppermint.
• The default IRC client, xchat, has been updated to version 2.8.8 and now automatically connects to #peppermint on irc.spotchat.org, our “official” IRC channel.
• The boot splash no longer has that weird blue tint to the background.  This was a detail left over from Lubuntu that we missed the first and second times around.  Hey, nobody’s perfect.
• All package updates as of June 17 have been installed and tested.  This includes lower level updates that the update manager will skip over due to potential stability issues.  Not that there are stability issues, it’s just that the update manager is a little overprotective sometimes.

The respin is up now.  Have fun with it.

Kendall Weaver and Team Peppemint

Good afternoon to all from Peppermint headquarters in the Western North Carolina mountains of the United States. We want to take today and this time to extend a very large welcome to the 55,000 users from 30 different countries that have downloaded Peppermint over the last three weeks directly from our servers. And, a large welcome to the countless others who arrived here via Bit Torrent or the USB stick of a friend.

We are really pleased that a large section of you are new to Linux and that Peppermint is the first Linux operating system that you have tried. The better news is that hundreds of you all have told us in the Forums and directly via email that you are here to stay and that excites us even more! Hearing this news is a great indicator to the Peppermint team that we are doing precisely what we set out to do and that is to offer a Linux operating system that is easy to understand, uses a familiar environment to explore with and even young children can operate Peppermint with little instruction.

Not only do we want to welcome the new users to Peppermint, we want to welcome you all to Linux, the family of Linux operating systems, and a permanent place with us on “Team Linux”. Other companies that provide operating systems use hundreds of employees and charge hundreds of dollars every time a new version releases and can only offer one product at a time, some of which are almost unusable to be quite frank about it. Once you get up to speed with Peppermint we want to encourage you to explore some of the other  members of Team Linux and the diverse family of Linux operating systems like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Gentoo, and Mandriva, just to name a few. Want to see them all side-by-side? Take a visit to Distrowatch and see all the members of Team Linux, your new team, and operating system family. We won’t let you down and there’s something here for everyone and every level of user.

With the news today that even Google has decided to drop Windows from its offices due to security reasons [Link Here] its time for the world to step back and look at its options for the future. If Google names Linux as a clear option for its future why wouldn’t you consider the same for your personal or business use? Its time for the world to realize the other option, the secure option, the freedom of choice option, and that option for the future is clearly Linux.

Welcome to Peppermint and welcome to Team Linux

Kendall Weaver, Shane Remington and Team Peppermint