Peppermint LINUX

I first tried Peppermint LINUX out a number of years ago. I was always a fan of the quicker less frilly distributions and I had flirted with DSL and Puppy.

I used Puppy for a while but because I had tried MINT out the Peppermint project interested me. The fact is that most of the applications I use are web based and so Peppermint is the perfect distribution for me.

All my documents are written using Google Docs and so to not have the heavy install of OpenOffice on my machine is a sound idea.

For those of you who do not know what Peppermint LINUX is the idea is to have a distribution that has minimal software installed as part of the main install but to use Prism to provide windows to common web based applications like Google Docs, Google Mail and Picasa.

If you use your computer for surfing the internet Peppermint is perfect. It is built on top of the core MINT distribution but with none of the software. It really does load in seconds. The Prism system used to display the applications works well.

The main reason I stopped using Peppermint was that I now do most of my home computing on a netbook and for a while I struggled to get Peppermint to install on the netbook as it doesn't have a cd/dvd rom drive.

For this reason I ended up going back to UBUNTU which is a failsafe as far as I'm concerned. UBUNTU has its critics but it does just work. For me UBUNTU 10.04 is as good an operating system as I have used. I have version 11.10 to try out but that is a project for next week.

Now I have recently heard about the UNETBOOTIN utility and so I have given Peppermint another go and I have managed to install it on my netbook.

The install was great and I was pleased with the fact that it made it easy to keep the UBUNTU partition safe whilst installing Peppermint in a separate partition. Unlike my recent attempt at installing MINT there were no issues with GRUB as my machine rebooted and Peppermint loaded just fine.

Peppermint no longer uses Prism to load the windows as there is now a custom loader which loads web applications into individual browser windows. It works great.

I will now be using Peppermint more regularly as it is the perfect fit for my Acer Aspire One D255 netbook.

UBUNTU is still my main distribution for when I experiment with developing software and for playing games as WINE works really well in UBUNTU.