Ice prevents freezing!

peppermint ice

Although I have a variety of computers, I mostly use three: a Macbook, a Samsung NC10, and a generic laptop that comes with my office at work. I use the generic laptop a lot, especially since I maintain a LAN in the school's admin block. But it came with only 200+ MB of RAM. Needless to say, the new releases of Ubuntu and OpenSUSE hardly get out of their starting blocks on this machine.

Enter Peppermint and especially Peppermint Ice! Instead of waiting, with mounting frustration, for the bigger distros to actually do something on this machine I can actually do my work through Peppermint without hassles. I prefer Ice since it's browser back-end is Chromium rather than Mozilla, and I also think it's slightly faster. Printing doesn't come with Ice initially but CUPS is easy to install via synaptic. All-in-all, I'm a fan.

Maverick Meerkat 10.10.10 has arrived!

Well, Maverick has finally arrived (Ubuntu 10.10). I've been running the Release Candidate for the last 24 hours and it works fine so far. Cardapio is installed and still cool, Swiftfox is still speedy, and K3b is still the best CD/DVD writer ever! My other favourite apps are also fine.

Visually, Maverick hasn't changed much but from the activity I've seen going on doing the installation and updates, there's been a lot of changes under the hood. Next week--after the official release--I'll see if I can install and run SchoolTool on this newbie. Should be fine though.

Gnome Global Menu Panic!

Up until very recently I always added the gnome global-menu ppa to any new install of a system and added the applet to my top desktop panel. I loved having the extra menus available at the top of the page (probably because I was a Mac user for 15 years). But a few days ago I noticed that something was hogging my ram and making my computer move like it was sliding through molasses. I discovered that global-menu was the culprit. Somehow or other it was throwing the CPU into a panic attack and just kept recycling, using up to 98% of the processing. I disabled it and then removed it. :(

But I gather that something similar is set to arrive in Maverick... (Ubuntu 10.10). :)?