Author Archive

It is our distinct honor to announce the release of the second major iteration of Peppermint OS. Peppermint Two is now available either for free download or via purchasable Live CD. This edition is based upon Lubuntu 11.04 and includes a number of new features. Also this marks the first time Peppermint has been available in 64 bit architecture. I’ll take a moment to cover some of the new features present in this release:

• We’re now using Chromium as the default web browser in our main release. This decision was made after gaining several months of user feedback and contrasting the pros and cons of both Chromium and Firefox. In addition, the Ice SSB framework was written to work with Chromium and the deprecation of Mozilla’s Prism project made this decision an easy one.
• The Ice SSB application has added functionality for removing SSBs as well as creating them. In hindsight, we probably should have put this in the first time around, but we’re happy to say that it’s there now.
• We’ve added some additional example SSBs to the default install from pixlr, including the Express photo editor and a remarkably entertaining photo filter app called pixlr-o-matic. We’re big fans of playing with photos and hope you have as much fun with these as we have.
• The entire look and feel has been revamped. We had a lot of feedback regarding the stylistic decisions we made with both Peppermint One and Peppermint Ice and decided that the best course of action was to fall somewhere in the middle, while offering improved themes for the windows and icons.
• Dropbox integration has been improved. The implementation that was present in the original release was constantly buggy and we’re happy to announce that these issues have been resolved.
• We’re now using the Guayadeque music player as the system default. After extensive testing, this music player offered us the best combination of positive traits such as ease of use, speed, install footprint, and scalability to handle large collections. It can be found in the Sound & Video menu under the name “Music Player”.
• There have been some other application changes, such as the inclusion of LXKeymap, which offers a comprehensive solution for changing keyboard layouts. Also you may notice that Gedit replaces Leafpad as the default text editor so that coders might take advantage of features such as syntax highlighting without having to install additional software.

We certainly hope you enjoy it. For specifics regarding the download and installation prodecures, please visit our newly written User’s Guide for the finer details. Peppermint Two is available immediately in both 32 bit format and in 64 bit format. Have fun with it and don’t forget to buy us a beer or two.

Kendall Weaver

Peppermint Nation,

We are proud to announce the availability of Peppermint Ice 20110302, being the latest respin of our Ice release. This version offers a fully updated system as of March 2nd, 2011 and comes with some bug fixes and new features:

• Like in Peppermint One, we have removed the hardware abstraction layer from this release in order to obtain better performance.
• The LFFL repository has been added to the default sources list in order to offer more current versions of more applications.
• Some region specific SSBs, such as Hulu and Pandora, have been removed from the default installation, but can easily be added back by using the Ice application.
• Some space saving optimizations have been made to the .iso file in order to minimize download and install times as much as possible.
• Thanks to a code contribution from the Fuduntu project, the Ice application received an obscure but much needed bug fix.

We’re currently spending some time working on the next steps for Peppermint OS and have some exciting things in store for the upcoming months. Amongst these are some projects that can hopefully bring us in better contact and collaboration with other distros, an upcoming appearance at the Southeast Linux Fest, and some interesting new applications we’ve been playing with that should help to improve the desktop experience for everyone.

The respin is available now over on the download page. Get it now and don’t forget to buy us a beer or two.

Kendall Weaver

We are proud to announce the release of Peppermint-One-08042010, being the third respin of our “One” release. This release offers a fully updated system as of August 4, 2010 and comes with a number of bug fixes, some new features, and some other miscellaneous goodies.

New Default Wallpaper by Blaine Puckett

• The default Firefox is now version 4.0 Beta 2.  Due to the recent issues with the 3.6.x series and the frequency of updates and instability we figured this would be a good move. It’s faster and generally more stable though a few extensions are likely to not work just yet.
• We’ve added a Prism launcher for the eBuddy instant messenger client.  We’ve had several requests for an IM client and after our testing eBuddy was the one to make the cut. It offers support for Yahoo, MSN, AIM, GTalk, Facebook, ICQ, and MySpace.
• We’re starting to maintain current vanilla versions of some of the GNU utilities in our repository.  This is a transition process that will probably take us several months, but as we move farther away from Ubuntu, this is an eventual necessity.
• The “Desktop Preferences” application is now available in the menu.  Due to an issue caused by enabling the window manager menu, this option was sometimes hidden, so we put it in the menu to make it more accessible to Peppermint users all the time.
• The mimetypes associations have been improved so double clicking certain file types will now open more appropriate applications for that particular file type.  This came to our attention when we realized plain text files weren’t being opened with Leafpad.
• The “crashing file manager” bug has been fixed.  Essentially there was an issue with version 0.9.5 of the file manager not wanting to play nice with one of the libraries, so we repackaged the file manager directly from the Debian Sid repository to circumvent this issue.
• There is now better support for some wireless and graphics cards.  This can be checked in the “Hardware Drivers” entry in the Preferences menu.

We’d also like to send a big thanks to Peppermint community member Blaine Puckett for the new Peppermint OS One default wallpaper. Blaine is a freelance artist, graphic designer and photographer based in the United States of America.

In other news we’ve started some application development with the Gdata API to better integrate some Google apps with the desktop, notably Google Docs.  This is currently in active development and we hope to unleash it in the very near future.  We’ve also figured out how to make user created Prism applications more “user specific” and will be offering this in the next respin as it’s currently in testing.

Anyway, the respin is up now.  Play with it, use it, enjoy it, and buy us a beer or three if you like it.

Kendall Weaver and Team Peppermint

Before you Download Peppermint please consider making a donation to our open-source project

Team Peppermint is proud to release its second offering: Peppermint Ice. This is not an upgrade to replace Peppermint OS One, but another project that we will be under constant development from here forward. Peppermint Ice was developed around Chromium as its default browser and a brand new SSB [Site Specific Browser] Application was developed by Kendall Weaver named “Ice” which this new Peppermint variant is named after.

Peppermint Ice Specs

ISO Size:

416 MB

System Requirements:

* i386 or derivative processor (AMD64 and x86_64 are fine as well)
* 192 MB of RAM
* 4 GB hard drive space (this is an overestimate just for good measure)

Under the Hood:

* Pcmanfm 0.9.7
* Openbox 3.4.11.2
* Xorg 1.7.6
* Lxsession 0.4.3

Default Cloud Applications:

Note: The default Cloud Applications are simply included in Peppermint Ice as an example of  the flexibility of the Peppermint Ice SSB  as opposed to locally installed applications [see "What is Ice" below]. These defaults can easily be removed and added again later as the user sees fit.

Editor by Pixlr [Image Editor], Facebook, Hulu, Last.FM, Pandora, Seesmic Web, The Cloud Player, YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Mail, Google Reader

Default Installed Applications:

Chromium Web Browser, Drop-Box, Xnoise [Music Management & Player], Ice, X-Chat [IRC Client], Transmission [Bit Torrent Client]

Click Here to see Screen Shots >>

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Team Peppermint is excited to release Peppermint Ice to the public. Please join us at the Peppermint Community Forums and let us know what you think. Your first hand feedback is very important to us

Kendall Weaver

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