Friday, June 10, 2011

Peppermint Two - Is Two Better than One in this case?

Peppermint OS came onto the scene just over a year ago, and it brought out new waves of enthusiasm. It was not quite a complete "Cloud-based" operating system, but it wasn't your completely traditional desktop operating system either. The original design fell somewhere in between the traditional general purpose desktop system and the completely network based mobile system. It's lighter than a traditional system in terms of startup speed and the heft of the overall system, but it's not quite the all or nothing - all in the Cloud approach found in Jolicloud's Joli OS or the imminent release of Google Chrome OS on the Acer and Samsung Chromebooks, which will be coming out this next week - as we reach the "ides" of June - the midway point of the month.

In the past, Peppermint OS has been a good system. From the appearance, I enjoyed the original Peppermint OS One the most, but on a practical level, I used both OS One and OS Ice. I just downloaded the latest version. Since Firefox has focused on Sync and is capable of handling application instances, the earlier Prism research project upon which Peppermint was based has been de-emphasized, so Peppermint Two uses a Google Chromium browser to achieve a Site Specific Behavior in a "Single Site Browser" - which is what Kendall Weaver, founder of Peppermint OS, calls the SSB. Both Mozilla's Prism Project and Google's Chrome and Chromium Web browser projects support the idea of a Single Site Browser. But Prism is more of a prototype, a concept generator; Chrome and Chromium are developing products with a number of incremental releases behind them. The latest version of Peppermint OS Two uses Google Chromium as its core Web browser. Kendall has included a number of SSBs in his distribution, and you can easily create your own by creating a Web instance of a specific page.

If you don't know how to do that and you are interested in finding out, write to me or check out the Peppermint OS site at http://peppermintos.com/about-peppermint/

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