bbosen - 2024-03-21

In March of 2024 I built up a Peppermint Linux machine on a 10 year-old LeNovo T61p laptop. The installation was smooth, easy, and quick. I used Synaptic to update all of the software to the current version. I was surprised to learn that no web browser was included by default, but it was easy to put firefox on it through prominent menu offerings. I didn't add ANYTHING else. This was a "virgin" Peppermint machine.

I used firefox to download LAC. I chose the AppImage for version 9.61. After downloading it and marking it as executable, I started it up from a bash shell according to the usual pattern and as discussed in our "LAC Distributed in universal, binary AppImage format" forum.

LAC's splash screen started up as I had expected, but clicking on LAC's built-in menu buttons didn't give me the expected result, so I downloaded, and installed the optional LacMenuLauncher as discussed HERE. I needed only about 5 minutes for that entire process because I have all of the steps memorized and I still didn't need to download or install any prerequisites.

LAC's AppImage runs nicely from LacMenuLauncher and I was able to enjoy several quick mission sessions with complete success. This old LeNovo laptop has old, fragile nVidia "Quadro"graphics hardware, but the default Peppermint setup didn't load the proprietary nVidia driver for it. It looks like they defaulted to the open-source "Nouveau" driver instead. As a consequence, LAC's framerates hovered around 40 FPS at 720P full-screen resolution, instead of the 60FPS performance I have come to expect. 40 FPS performance is entirely adequate, but I'm confident that if I can figure out how to load the optimized nVidia video driver I'll see the same rock-solid 60 FPS performance I normally get on my Raspberry Pi and other machines.