Tag Archives: Me and my Eee
Me and My Eee – Peppermint OS Ice
Hello everyone and welcome to the latest review from Me and my Eee. Today I’ll be reviewing Peppermint OS Ice Edition. Peppermint OS claims to be light on the processor, so that’s great news for my netbook which is a Eeepc 904HD loaded with a 900MHz CPU. This is also aimed to be a “Cloud” OS so expect a few web-based programs!
So this Linux Distribution sounds perfect for my netbook even more perfect than my favourite, Fedora, Linux distribution. So I hit the download button on their site for Peppermint OS Ice Edition. There are 2 different versions of Peppermint OS. The default one which uses Firefox or the Ice Version which uses Chromium instead. The .iso image of Peppermint OS Ice is under 500mb which is also great considering the more popular Linux distributions are around 700mb such as Ubuntu and Fedora.
Once Perppermint OS finished downloading it was straight to putting the liveCD onto a usb stick using the Universal Linux Installer. I booted from the USB Stick and had a play around using the live session option. It looked like it was based on Linux Mint 9, the latyest version of Linux Mint, which is great since a lot of people gave Linux Mint 9 great reviews on how it performed on a Netbook. It also looks like Peppermint OS is using LXDE as it’s desktop enviroment, which is one of the lightest Desktop Enivroments for Linux.
I continued to have a play around on the Live Session for a few minutes until I decided that I would definately use this as a main OS on my Netbook. The installer was very simple like most GUI Linux Installers, you just enter the similar details such as creating a Username/Password, setting the time and date and also setting up the parition table for your hard drive.
Peppermint OS didn’t take long at all to install, on their websdite it states that the full install size is under 4GB so that’s great news for the owners of older Eeepc’s with small hard drives.
The screenshot above is my current desktop, had to tweak around with te settings a bit since it did look a tad bit ugly, I applied a new walpaper my trusty android wallpaper and also tweaked around with the task bar since the “Panel Preferences” menu has many options to mess around with.
The next thing I did was take a look at what programs were avaible from the Menu panel, like I had said before there is a lot of Web-Apps such as Facebook, Google Docs and YouTube for example and no signs of big programs such as OpenOffice on here.
If you were a fan of Web-based applications Peppermint OS offers you to easily make your own using it’s program called “Ice” and enter in details such as URL, Title and Icons to use for the application.
Obviously there are some programs that are actually installed on here such as Leafpad which is a great text editior and I thought looked so much better than other Linux-based Text Editors such as Gedit and was also a bit easier to navigate around.
If your Netbook has the hard drive space like mine, for example, you can also install applications to save on your hard drive using the Software Centre from Linux Mint 9. Linux Mint’s Software Centre is excellent, it has catagorized each application so it’s easy to navigate through each listing of applications as well as offering users the chance to review each program so it gives other user’s a good overview about the program before they download and try it out themselves.
Conclusion
Peppermint OS ice is definately a great OS. It’s very easy to get to grips with even if you’re a Windows-based user! It’s very fast and very light on my Netbook’s spec, which is perfect for my needs, it’s very quick and snappy. Even though it looks visually a bit ugly it doesn’t take long to give it a “cool” finish. If I had an extra “E” in my out of 5 “E” rating, I’d definately give it to this OS. But unfortunately I only rate it out of 5 so… I’m going to give Peppermint OS Ice edition a very big 5 out of 5 E’s!
EEEEE
So that’s it for now until next time, if you haven’t noticed already I’ve changed the structure of the “Me and My Eee” article this time by removing the sub-headings through the article this should hopefully make my articles flow a lot more. Next time, I’ll be finally giving Windows-based users a run down of the top 10 programs to use on a Netbook so stay tuned for that!
Me and my Eee – Ubuntu 10.4 Review
So like I said at the end of the last “Me and my Eee” article, I was going to take a look at the second version of Ubuntu 10.4, yes I know it’s just a week and a bit to go until the final build is released but I thought I’d give all you readers a insight into the 10.4 version a few days before the final is out so you can determine if it’s worth downloading or not, so you don’t have to waste your bandwidth and most importantly your time. Anyway, onto the review!
My Experience
So I put the beta 2 image of Ubuntu 10.4 onto my usb via Ubootnetin and then booted the Live CD/USB from my Netbook. Now, it’s been a while since I last tried the last release of Ubuntu but this new version definitely is a lot quicker booting off the USB than the 9.10 version.
Once you’re loading up Ubuntu 10.4 you will be greeted by a nice smooth looking purple splash screen, this only takes about a minute or so when running of my cheap USB. Once you reach the desktop you would notice that the 10.4 release has got a brand new dark theme compared to the bland grey theme in the previous versions. You will also noticed that they have gone with a “Mac-like” layout for the windows, but don’t worry you can always select many of the previous themes if you want the windows buttons switched from the left back to the right.
After I had a quick look around the 10.4 version I decided that I ought to install it in order to get the full experience of this new Ubuntu release. The installer is pretty much the same as the one used in the 9.10 release so there is nothing much to mention about it. Installation was pretty quick however not as quick as Eeebuntu 3.0 like I previously used, but this is probably because it’s a new so it means more features to install, no real problem really, it wasn’t sluggish and did install in minutes.
As usual, after I finished installing Ubuntu 10.4 to my hard drive the first thing I did was give it my personal touch by doing simple tasks like changing the desktop image (I’ve reused the Lego Star Wars background from my Eeebuntu installation because frankly… it’s awesome!) and thought it would be cool to take the idea of using a GNOME panel and transforming it into a dock-like application launcher like the Eeebuntu team did with their OS.
When it comes to discussing programs I have noticed that they have included a great application called Gwibber, I’m currently using this for my twitter account since it gives me notifications to when someone mentions me in their tweet, but I do believe that this program also allows you to connect to several different social networking sites. I have noticed that there is other new applications included in this new one such as “simple scan” which I’ve heard is a great little app for all you people who scan in documents sadly, I don’t so I can not judge it myself.
Pros
Ubuntu 10.4 compared to the previous versions seems a lot quicker and a lot more responsive; heck the boot time is almost as quick as Windows 7 on here if not quicker! I’m sure once the final version has been out for a few months we’ll start seeing a few cool tips on how to knock of a couple of seconds off of our boot times too!
Cons
My only nit pick with this latest version of Ubuntu is that this new theme just feels a little bulky, so it takes up a bit of screen space, but trying to get as much screen space as possible on our tiny screens is vital! But there is no problem in changing to a thinner theme, I guess.
Conclusion
Ubuntu Lucid Lynx has redeemed it self from it’s previous sluggish versions, I would really consider this as a strong competitor for a main Operating System to use on my netbook. So with that, it’s won itself 5 E’s out of 5.
EEEEE
Now I’m off to promote these reviews, I’ve got a few ideas for the next “Me and my Eee” review, although, I think I’ve decided on doing the top 10 applications for your Windows based netbook. But until then…
OVER AND OUT!
