Hmmm Peppermint

After struggling with my computer for several months I've come to the horrific conclusion that Ubuntu is getting to be too much for my ancient hardware. Any significant disk activity bogs the system down to where it nearly becomes unusable or causes apps to freeze up for a while. Waiting for a video to finish downloading in Flash on Youtube or downloading updates often do this. Gnome it seems is probably the cause, its gained some weight and needs to go on a diet.

So, I've been looking at different lightweight distros. I wanted to stay with an Ubuntu derived distro because I've found those to be the most well polished. I've tried other distros before like Fedora, SimpleMEPIS and PCLinuxOS. That experience made me appreciate just how ahead of the curve Ubuntu really is. My first choice was going to be Xubuntu with the lightweight XFCE desktop environment. But, then I saw Linux Mint had an XFCE and LXDE version. I also wanted to find a way to deal with the screen resolution issue I have with Ubuntu also. This stems from the fact that Xorg doesn't detect what kind of monitor I have and you can't manually change what monitor you're using anymore from within Ubuntu. I've been editing my etc/X11/xorg.conf file to fix this. I should have to.

Well, I saw a blog on Linux Today (does anyone ever post comments on that site at all) about a new Ubuntu derivative called Peppermint One. Its actually a derivative of a derivative, compatible with repos from both Ubuntu and Linux Mint. The default desktop is Lxsession and Openbox, so its very light on the system resources. Like Mint all of the media codecs I need are already pre-installed, as well as encrypted DVD playback. The LiveCD is only 400MB, needs just 196MB of RAM to run and 4GB roughly to install. It can run on virtually any processor from an Intel Atom to a Core i7 or AMD Phenom II. The menu and panel look like Linux Mint's LXDE panel, PCManFM 0.9.7 is the file manager, Leafpad 0.8.17 is the default text editor, and Firefox 4 Beta is the default web browser. I installed Google Chrome (stable) from the PPA.

The Software Manager is Peppermint One's answer to the Ubuntu Software Center. It was built from Webkit and displays information pages about the different applications you can install in HTML. You can also view screenshots of applications, read reviews, and even write a review. There's a Feature Software section with the usual suspects; Picasa, Opera, VLC, Pidgin, OpenOffice, etc. Few native apps are actually installed. Most are Mozilla Prism apps of Google's various services like Gmail, Reader, and Calendar. There are also Prism apps of The Cloud Player, Last.fm, Hulu, Pandora, Facebook, eBuddy Web-based IM and Seismic Web for accessing Twitter, Google Buzz, Facebook, LinkedIn and FourSquare. Exaile is the default music player while Gnome Mplayer is the default video player. Editor by Piclr, a cloud based graphics editor, takes the place of the GIMP, Transmission is included which is nice, and Xchat RC is also pre-installed. The surprisingly feature rich Disk Utility 2.30.1 is included as is Synaptic Package Manager and Cheese for webcams. Dropbox is also included without needing Nautilus which is also a nice plus. ALSA is the default audio server in place of PulseAudio.

On my Flintstones era desktop (PC-Chips K7 motherboard, 1.2GHz AMD Athlon XP, 1GB PC2700 RAM, 8x AGP Nvidia Geforce FX 5600, Sound Blaster Live 24-bit, 16x DVD-RW, 160GB Maxtor IDE, 80GB Samsung IDE, Realtek 10/100 Ethernet) Peppermint One runs far smoother than Ubuntu 10.04 did. Correcting the screen resolution issue was actually pretty easy. I still couldn't manually change the monitor settings from the desktop, but I was able to replace /etc/X11/xorg.conf with one the Nvidia Xserver Configuration tool created using Ubuntu 10.04 and it worked without the same headaches I've had in the past. Significant disk activity doesn't make the system nearly unusable. Its slows things down but not to the point that I have to wait. Youtube videos are actually a lot more playable, though I have to use Flash. WebM videos play poorly, even on my more powerful Acer Aspire 4520 laptop (1.8GHz AMD Athlon64x2, 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD, Nvidia Geforce 7000M/nForce 610M, Realtek High-Definition Audio, 16x DVD-RW, Atheros Wi-Fi, Nvidia 10/100 Ethernet) WebM playback is ok as long as I don't go full screen (though I can play WebM videos in VLC without a problem, the codecs in the browsers much suck). H.264 fairs better but plays back in a dedicated video player far better than the browser.

There are two problems which I have yet to figure out. There aren't deal breakers but I'd like to get them working. On Ubuntu I used Wally or Desktop Drapes to change my wallpaper every so often. I can load them in Peppermint One but they don't change the wallpaper. Also, I can't get Compiz Fusion desktop compositing to work, though I've been told it can be done with LXDE and I've seen Youtube videos demonstrating it. Any suggestions?

Other than those speed bumps I'd say Pappermint One has enormous potential. They're managed to preserve the ease of use which Ubuntu is famous for, but they could do more in that department. Hell, even Ubuntu could be better there. I recommend this as a viable OS for old computers if you're looking an Ubuntu-like experience that's free of the hassles of trying to get media codecs installed and working.