Hello Peppermint Nation,
Welcome back to the new and improved Peppermint web site and welcome to the next iteration of our operating system: Peppermint Four. We are seriously excited about this release and we hope you are as ecstatic as all of us on Team Peppermint. Make sure to download a bunch of copies and give them to friends and family. They will thank you, for sure.
We need to take this opportunity to thank everyone who makes Peppermint happen. Team Peppermint is an amazing group of people from around the globe who pitch in their personal time to this project and without them we would be going nowhere fast. And a monster thank you to the millions of users worldwide who rely on the stability of Peppermint on a daily basis. You all are the reason we get up every day and keep things humming along.
A very big thanks to the collective brainpower of our Beta Test group! We handpicked 50 candidates from a barrel full of willing souls and put them through the wringer morning, noon, and night for two solid months until the final Peppermint Four was approved. You all were awesome and we hope you sign up for the Peppermint Five beta next year.
Also, I need to make serious mention about VPS.NET and how instrumental they are to Peppermint. To put it clearly – Without VPS.NET none of this would be possible. Back in 2010 when we first launched Peppermint, our popularity was growing so rapidly that we were crashing the web server with round the clock downloads and were threatened to be shut down in 48 hours. Over the next two days via Twitter we started spreading the word that we needed to raise cash or sink. Who came to our rescue? VPS.NET. They heard about our situation, stepped in, migrated us over to their cloud, and we have been there ever since. We can’t say enough about their entire team, their immaculate customer service, and the stability and reliability of their cloud. To all at VPS.NET, we are forever grateful for your dedication to Peppermint and your ongoing support of open source software. When you download Peppermint in the USA, Canada, Japan, Norway, Africa or one of the other 140 countries and territories that we can be found, thank VPS.NET – they deliver every download of Peppermint world wide.
We also want to thank 1938 Media and their entire team for sponsoring us on the Cloud Coverage segments with Loren Feldman. If that’s how you first heard about Peppermint then we want to thank you for coming over and checking us out. 1938 News is truly a great resource for straight from the hip, reliable information, news and opinion. Peppermint is seriously honored to be a part of 1938 News and Cloud Coverage.
If you didn’t know, Peppermint is open source and free to the world and this is our intention, year after year, each and every version. All of us on Team Peppermint volunteer our time to make this happen because we love it. We love to see people using it. Plain and simple. However, it does take money to pay the bills, purchase shipping supplies, monthly fees for other critical services and all sorts of minor expenditures. If you use Peppermint on a daily basis, you love it, your friends and family love it, please consider making a donation so we can keep Peppermint free, Forever. That’s our goal and we appreciate your help in any way you can. Every dollar counts.
A final huge thanks to all involved, especially our families, children and close friends for putting up with us while we toil in front of the machine all night. We can’t say it enough.
Now, start downloading copies and giving them to your friends. All of them. Peppermint is about Freedom. Go share it.
Kendall, Shane and Team Peppermint
In the face of recent dust-ups about the NSA, Verizon, Google, and so forth have there been any changes in distro policy or attempts at figuring out where you intend on going?
Fears over NSA poisoning the cloud aside I’m picking you guys over mint linux because LXDE is a lot more useable than MATE on my laptop.
Andrew,
That’s a very good question and one that’s difficult to answer without giving up a lot of information about our future plans, but I’ll try and answer as best as I can.
Peppermint, both the operating system and the US based company that manages its maintenance, is appalled at the behavior of the NSA and we believe that spying without just cause is unethical and should be illegal. At present we do not offer any cloud services, just an OS that hopefully facilitates access to existing ones, so no changes to distro policy have been implemented thus far, but the owners of Peppermint LLC (Shane Remington and I) are in the middle of an internal dialog regarding our approach should we offer such services in the future. Thus far we have determined that we have no intention to allow unwarranted spying within any of our products in any capacity, but we are bound by US law should we offer any cloud services in the future. Regardless, the recent developments regarding unwarranted NSA spying will have an impact as to how we proceed in the future. I do want to explore what protections, if any, are afforded us by having our hosting provider based in the UK rather than the US.
Ultimately we want to be on the side of our users. At this point there are a lot of unanswered legal questions. Until we have answers to those questions it’s difficult to say how we will react, but I can assure you that we are 100% against unwarranted spying.
I apologize in advance if any of this makes me sound like a politician.
I’m not sure if it is still like this, but back in the day, strong encryption software was not available to European (and UK) residents, but only to US and Canada. Would your switching to a UK-based hosting provider be a compromise to any encryption strength available for private use over there?
Do you guys make torrents available for your releases? If you don’t, and if you plan on creating official torrents in the future, I can help seed them. I like to use the unused space in my seedbox to help smaller distributions (not Ubuntu community size distributions) get their torrents seeded better.
Daniel,
Thanks for your question about Torrents. Although we don’t make Torrents for our own releases, there are several outlets that will provide them shortly after we release. We follow the process that if you let us know the details, we will gladly list it as a source. The community also posts Torrents at the official forum: PeppermintOS.net
Kindest regards
Shane
I haven’t pulled down the new release yet, but I’ve always thought the the greatest thing about Peppermint is the true freedom of choice it gives the user. Seamless integration of cloud and the desktop. The user can opt for fully cloud based applications, or can tap into a huge repository of well maintained desktop packages. The user gets to decide for themselves. Personally, I’d love to see Peppermint tied in with owncloud, which provides private clouds on your own hardware.
I agree with Zach – I already have a hosted owncloud instance, smooth integration of this into peppermint would be lovely
*wringer, as in “to wring water out of”, or in this case – “to wring testing out of”
Thank you!! My copy editor didn’t catch that one Speling Nasi [very clever] ;)
Sounds good, i’m giving this a download at the mo. Just recently put peppermint 3 on my netbook and happy with it. What interesting changes should i be looking out for when i get round to running the live of peppermint 4?
Can I upgrade from peppermint 3 to 4?
You will need to 1) Back Up your P3 version 2) Install the new version. It has always been this way. Clean installation.
In Fact: This is my ‘Easy Upgrade’ method – I have a complete filing system in my Dropbox folder, I keep nothing on the desktop or in any other directory. Upgrading is a snap because as soon as I install the next version, I sign into Dropbox and ‘Presto’ its all back where it was to begin with.
There you have it
I have been a big fan of Peppermint 3 and downloaded the new 32 bit version of 4. However it failed my first test of any distro when it would not play the HD version of veetle.com. A lot of distros have trouble with it,especially 64 bit versions.I am going back to Peppermint 3 because it works perfectly on that version.
Thanks for the action there, good thinkin’. We just announced Torrents on the front page: http://PeppermintOS.com
Thanks. Please take down my link – it was only meant to stay there until you guys add your own. :)
Done
It’s very smooth. The only thing I noticed was on the 32bit, it would not install to my T41p laptop but it’s too old from what I found out. I got the non PAE error. Right now I’m using a new i5 desktop and it’s working great of course. Thanks
non pae was a nice thing about peppermint :(
i installed pep4 on delld505 1.7mhz m cpu non pae laptop.
look in peppermint forums ,where i posted how i did it.
p.s.. for non pae installing,look in NEWUSERS section for Nonpae Topic.
Can’t wait to try it out on my Acer laptop!
Great distro. I have been a Linux user since 1994 and used most of the major distros over the years as my desktop OS and some of the smaller ones from time to time. I must say Peppermint OS is one of the best I have used. Its fast, it “just works” and it is user friendly enough for my Mum to sit down and check her email on. I love the lightweight nature of the OS and that it comes with the essential tools I need and nothing else. There is no bloat but I can install my preferred apps. Keep up the great work.
Barnet
I love Peppermint OS 4 and can’t believe that I waited this long to try it. No more virus scans ( or viruses… EVER) I can not recommend it highly enough. It blows Windows away.