Peppermint OS Six released
Peppermint OS has long been known for its ability to blend desktop and cloud applications into a highly attractive and eminently usable Linux distribution. The latest release is Peppermint OS Six, and you can download it right now.
Mark Greaves at the Peppermint site made the official announcement:
Peppermint is excited to announce the launch of our latest operating system Peppermint Six. Lightweight and designed for speed, Peppermint Six delivers on that promise whether using software on your desktop, online, or using cloud based apps.
Initially, Peppermint One was designed out of our desire for an operating system optimized for working online. Each year since then, we have improved on it, and we are very excited about new and improved features in Peppermint Six.
Peppermint Six Highlights
Peppermint 6 is still built on the 14.04 LTS (Long Term Support) base, but we’ve moved to the 14.04.2 “point release” which includes the 3.16 kernel and an updated graphics stack. (this is to sidestep the upstream 9 month support issue that comes with basing on the not LTS code bases).
We’re now using the Nemo file manager, which gives some nice new features including the ability to handle custom nemo action scripts, better desktop management, easier mounting and management of remote network shares (including Windows SMB shares, WebDAV, FTP, SFTP over SSH, etc.), and a smoother overall experience.
Along with our policy of not sticking with standard LXDE components where better choices are available, we’ve dropped the LXTerminal in favour of Sakura which allows tabbed terminals, scrolling, and Gtk+3 color handling including background images.
The Update Manager has been replaced with MintUpdate, but with the same settings as update-manager, so the bottom panel update shield makes a comeback.
In line with user feedback and proven format handling Guayadeque and Gnome MPlayer have been replace with VLC as a “one app to play them all” replacement.
The default image viewer has been changed from Mirage to the eog (Eye of Gnome) image viewer.
The xfce4-power-manager has been replaced by mate-power-manager and i3lock replaces light-locker as the default ScreenLock which was causing problems for some users. We’ve moved to the Gnome Search Tool which has a more intuitive user interface, and finer grained control of search criteria.
The new Wallpaper manager (based on nitrogen) now makes wallpaper management a breeze, just right-click on the desktop and select “Change Desktop Background” and you’ll see what we mean. The ability to right-click any image file and choose “Set as wallpaper” is also still present.
Linux Mint’s USB creation tools “mintstick” are now included by default, making the creation of LiveUSB’s from isohybrid ISO images and the formatting of USB sticks as simple as it gets.
Peppermix is our new window manager and widget theme, and for all the dark theme lovers out there (and we know you are legion), we’ve included a dark version “Peppermix-Dark”.
Smaller tweaks include 2 new keyboard shortcuts:-
PrtSc = save a whole screen capture to your desktop
Alt+PrtSc = save just the active window to your desktop
The addition of a right click “Calculate MD5 Checksum” context menu item
The activation of the F4 = “Open Terminal Here” Nemo accelerator
And various bug fixes.
If you're new to Peppermint OS, be sure to check out the official User's Guide to help you get your feet on the ground with it:
Thank you for choosing to download Peppermint as your operating system. This simple guide should help you to get up and running in as little time as possible, going over the basics of making a bootable CD or USB drive then installing and setting things up the way you like them.
Chapter 1 - Download and Install
Chapter 2 - An Intro to the Desktop
Chapter 3 - Customizing the Desktop
Chapter 4 - Installing and Removing Software
Chapter 5 - Site Specific Browsers and the Ice Application
Chapter 6 - Additional Reading and Resources