Peppermint is a derivative of Lubuntu specially designed for cloud computing on smaller computers. Conventional applications on the CD are limited to Chromium, Guayadeque (music), X-Chat, and Gnome-Mplayer; these worked well. Everything else is done using cloud applications. These include well-known services like Dropbox and Google Docs, along with things like Seesmic Web for social networking and the Pixlr Express photo editor. Obviously, you can install real applications from Ubuntu as well.

Now the problems. Gnome-Mplayer wouldn’t play any video files. Were codecs supposed to be installed? If not, where do you get them? Neither the package manager nor the web-site were any help. Guayadeque looked as if it was trying to play an mp3, but (being Ubuntu) my USB speakers couldn’t be enabled, so there was no way of telling whether it was succeeding. Chromium couldn’t play flash videos because the plugin version was the one that doesn’t work with older AMD processors. Then I tried to install. The installer was the version of Ubiquity that crashes on certain computers, including mine, so I couldn't.

Looking around the internet showed that a lot of people are happily using Peppermint, but I can only report on how it worked for me, and it didn’t.