Peniscoins are similar to Bitcoins. Both are using a secure SHA-256 hashing algorithm for generating the coins.
to run the peniscoin miner just open a terminal and type
git clone https://github.com/davidak/python-peniscoin-miner.git
cd python-peniscoin-miner
python3 miner.py
example output
2013-05-25 05:24:09 64.70 MHash/s 2 Peniscoins mined in 203.245 seconds
im getting 65 MHash/s on a Intel i7 (so far it uses only one core).
more features like multithreading, opencl and a mining pool are planned.