We are proud to announce the availability of Peppermint-One-01042011 being the latest respin of our original release. This version offers a fully updated system as of January 4, 2011 and comes with some bug fixes as well as some new features.
- The default kernel has been updated to 2.6.35 in order to stay more current regarding hardware support and to match the kernel in Peppermint Ice.
- The Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) has been completely removed from this edition in order to help with performance and to increase application modularity.
- The default screenshot application has been replaced with PyShot, a simple Python/GTK application contributed by our longtime friend and supporter, Ikey Doherty.
- Some low level utilities have been updated such as the GNU Coreutils to version 8.8, the Samba file sharing framework to 3.5.6, and others.
- Some user level applications have also received updates such as the PCManFM file manager to 0.9.8, LXTerminal to 0.1.9, and Firefox to 4.0b8
We’re presently experimenting with release candidate builds of the 2.6.37 kernel in hopes that our next respin can fully support things like Broadcom wireless cards out of the box with no additional drivers installed. We’re also considering moving away from Ubuntu’s kernels altogether in order to offer our own builds based on the venerable Liquorix kernel (which is, in turn, based on the Xen kernel) though this may take a good deal of time to properly implement. The next step after that is to try and work with NVIDIA to offer better graphics support out of the box for the many users of their products in the Linux world.
In unrelated but important news, happy birthday to Kendall Weaver, the co-founder and lead developer of this project. When you see him please buy him a beer or two.
The respin is up now on our download page. Have fun with it. :)
Shane Remington