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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.

• 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

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