After flowing this Tutorial , you will be able to install Linux Mint even if you have never installed Linux. I am going to walk you through all the necessary steps. You will see How to check if your hardware is compatible with Linux. Which system to install 64 or 32 bit. How to make a bootable USB drive with a Linux OS on it. I will also show you some BIOS settings that may be necessary for Linux installation. How to back up your data before the installation.
Of course, you will see the installations process with all
the necessary explanations. And in the end, you will learn some
post-installation settings that will help to make your system secure and little
faster than it is by default. The last step will be to restore the backup data
on your newly installed Linux Mint system. If you are an absolute beginner and
you have never installed Linux, this video is for you. Let’s get started! Hello
everyone !It’s Average Linux User.
At the beginning, I would like to point out a few helpful
things. This tutorial is quite long, so
try to follow me step by step .
Hardware comparability with Linux Unfortunately, not all
hardware is compatible with Linux. And this is not a fault of Linux. It is
because some manufactures do not want to open-source their drivers or do not
make proprietary drivers for Linux. But do not worry Linux works fine on the
most hardware. Nevertheless, before you attempt to install Linux, I recommend
you to do some research. First, you can check the Ubuntu certified hardware
list.
If your computer is
on the list, you are lucky, and you should have no problems with Linux on your
computer. This database is also useful if you want to buy new hardware and you
want to make sure that it is compatible with Linux. Second, you can check the
Arch Linux Laptop page. Although this information is not for Linux Mint, if it
says that Arch Linux works fine on your laptop, then Linux Mint will work fine
too. For example, let’s look at Apple laptops. As you can see almost everything
works. However, some models have problems with a webcam. So, if you install
Linux on MacBook Air 2, you will have to sacrifice webcam use. Finally, it is
always good to google the model of your computer together with the word
“Linux”and see if there are any major problems.
For example, let’s google Asus X51R Linux. And as you can
see the first bug is “Graphical User Interface fail while on battery”. Such
kind of messages should make you cautious, and it is better to do more research
before you decide to install Linux on this laptop. I had experience of
installing Linux Mint on this laptop, and I wasn’t able to eliminate this bug.
Whether 64-bit or 32-bitBefore you even download the Linux installation image, you
need to know if your processor supports the 64-bit systems. There are many ways
to do it. If your hardware is not very old, it is very unlikely that it doesn’t
support 64-bit. Nevertheless, it is still good to check it for sure. If you are
on Windows 7 ,windows 8 or windows 10, go to Start Menu, right click on your computer and select
properties.
Here you can see the system type. If it says 64 bit, you are
fine, and you can go and download Linux Mint 64-bit ISO. However, it may say
that your Windows is 32-bit,but it doesn’t mean that your processor doesn’t
support 64 bit. The 64bit processors can work fine with 32bit systems. In this
case, you need to go to the device manager and find the model of your
processor. In my case, it is Intel i3-4330 with the frequency 3. 5. I google it
and go to the official Intel website. Then I need to find what architecture it
supports. Here in the Advanced Technologies section, I can see that my
processor is, in fact, 64-bit. So, I can download the 64-bit Linux Mint image.
Unfortunately, I do not have other Windows versions, and I cannot show you this
procedure on Windows 10 or Windows 8. I assume the same steps should work there
too. If you are on Mac, you need to go to About This Mac and it will show you
the model of your processor.
Then you simply google it. I can give you a tip if your Mac
has a Core Duo processor, it is 32-bit architecture. Otherwise, you have a
64-bit processor. Make a bootable USB When you know the architecture of your
processor, you need to download the Linux Mint installer. So, you go to Linux
Mint website, then go to download and select the left-most menu. It is the
latest stable version of Linux Mint. Currently, it is 18. 1. Linux Mint has
several Desktop Environments: Cinnamon, Mate, XFCE and KDE. It’s up to you
which desktop environments to choose. The difference between these environments
deserves a separate video. If you do not know which desktop environment to
choose, I recommend downloading Cinnamon because it is default in Linux Mint.
If your hardware is old, you will benefit from installing XFCE. I will download
Cinnamon 64bit.
There are two download options. You can use torrent. If you
do not know how to use torrent, then download using a direct link. You need to
find your country, and click on any link that is available. If there several
links for your country, just use one that you think is the closest to your
location. This will download the ISO file, which is an image of the Linux Mint
installer. Next, we need to write this image to a USB drive. Of course, you can
also burn this image to a DVD drive, but I do not recommend doing so. The performance
will be very reduced. I assume that most of the people watching this video use
Windows. To make a bootable UBS from within Windows, I recommend using
Universal USB Installer. It works the best in my opinion.
Go to its website and download it. I provide the link in the
description. Then double click on the file of Universal USB Installer. If you
get warning like this, do not worry. Give it permission to run. It is safe.
Agree with terms of the License. Select Linux Mint as your distribution. Browse
for the downloaded Linux Mint ISO file and select it. Never select the option
“show all drives”. I repeat, do not select 'show all drives'. If you select
this option, all your hard drives become available for writing. You can
accidentally write the Linux Mint image to your main hard drive and destroy your
windows system and all your data. That is why it says "use with
caution".
Also, disconnected
all external USB hard drives that you accidentally do not write into them.
Select your USB flash drive and make sure that it is your flash drive. If you
go to your computer, the flash drive will be listed in Removable storage. In my
case it is the disk F. So, I make sure
that I selected the disk F in the step 3. Then, select Format the drive. Be
aware that this step will remove all the data from your Flash drive. So, if you
have any important data on your USB drive, you still can cancel the process and
copy this data somewhere. If you are sure that you have selected all the right
options and copied the important data from the USB drive, you can click
“Create”. This will write the Linux Mint image to the USB drive. It takes from
5 to 20 minutes. During this time I recommend you to go back to the Linux Mint
download page and check the Release Notes.
You can find here some useful
information. For example, how to fix freezes that happen with some graphic
cards. You can also check the known issues and how to fix them. We will come
back to some of these points during the installation processes. In case, you do
not use Windows, for example, you already use Linux or you have only Mac. You
can create a bootable USB drive from within these two systems too. Again, there
are many ways to do it on Linux and Mac. For new users, I recommend using Unetbootin.
It is available in most Linux distributions. Just search for it in your
software manager and install it.
If you do not find it in your distribution, you
can download it from the website. You go to Linux Linux and install it as described here. You can add PPA for Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based systems. Alternatively, you can download the binary file. For Mac OS you can download the dmg file and run it as many other Mac programs. The interface of this program is the same for all platforms. The process here is similar to Universal USB installer that I showed before. You select the option “Disk Image”, search for the downloaded Linux Mint image. In the Type, select USB. The same pre-cautions apply here. Be careful that you do not select any Hard Disk.
Also, it is better to disconnect all external USB hard drives. So, you do not accidentally write into them. Be sure you selected the UBS flash drive in the Drive option. And click OK. Wait until the process is finished and make sure there were no errors. When a bootable USB is created, we need to test it. Keep your USB flash drive in the USB port and reboot the computer. During the fist second of the boot process, you should see some message which tells you to press a certain key to launch the boot menu. You can see it is F11 on my system.For you, it can be any other key. Usually, Esc, Del or F12. Press that key and when you see a boot menu like this, select your flash drive. I select Samsung flash drive in my case. If everything is fine, you should boot into the Linux Mint Live session. This is how it looks. In case, it doesn’t work, there are two possible reasons. First, you created a bootable UBS drive incorrectly.
Go back and make sure you download a full Linux Mint ISO
file and that you write the ISO to the UBS drive without errors. Second, you
may have some restriction settings in your BIOS. Let’s have a look at the BIOS
settings. BIOS settings. There are two things that you may cause problems for
your Linux installation. The first one is the secure booting. The second one is
the UEFI mode. I recommend disabling both. You need to go to your BIOS
settings. To do that reboot your machine and during the first second of the
booting you should see a screen like this. And it should say which key to press
in order to enter the BIOS settings. It is the Del key in my case. So, I press
"del" and enter the settings. And in the settings, you need to find
boot options and there find secure boot and UEFI. I do not have the secure boot
option on my computer. But I have UEFI, and I can choose between UEFI and
UEFI+Legacy. I enabled the option UEFI+Legacy. If you cannot disable the UEFI
mode, do not worry.
Linux can be installed with the UEFI mode too. But I think
it is a very new technology, and it doesn’t work well yet. If you have secure
boot, you need to disable it. The menu will look like this. After these
actions, you should have no problems booting to the Linux Mint Live session.
Back up your data. This is a very important step. I would say it is the most
important step because if you do it wrong or you skip it, you will lose all
your data. I would also like to state here that I am not responsible for any of
your data loss if my tutorial won’t work for you. I just show you the ways to
do it, but it is you who has to do the work and take all responsibility. So, do
not blame if loss your data. There are various ways to do backups. It is
getting more and more popular to use cloud backup. So, if you use any of online
backup services ,then backup all your data before the installation process. And
check with the provider of your cloud service if it will be possible to
download the data to Linux system. Unfortunately, I am not very familiar with
cloud backup services and cannot show any example. I usually back up all my
data using external USB drives. I think it is the cheapest and quite reliable
way to backup the data. You can buy a 2TB drive for less than 100$.
I will show you how to backup your data using an external
USB drive. First, you can back up all your data from within Windows. I think
the easiest way to back up the data from windows will be by copying all your
files to an external USB drive. If you have only one disc on your Windows it is
probably the Disk C. You need to go to this disk, then go to the folder Users
and copy the folder with your username. In my case, it is called Vbox. And
paste it into the USB drive. It is possible that you created folders outside of
this user folder, so make sure you copy those folders too. If you have more
than one disk, often people also have disk D, copy all the data from those
disks too. This is not an ideal way to backup the data, but I think it is the
easiest to understand for the majority users. If you are experienced Windows
users, you can use some specific programs to do the backup. But make sure that
your data is not compressed into any proprietary format. It is better to backup
without any compression.
The second option is to back up your data using Linux. When
you are in Linux Mint Live session, open the file manager and find your windows
hard drive. Click on it, this will mount it to the system. Next, go to the main
menu and search for Backup Tool. Click on Backup Files and in the source select
the folder you want to back up. To back up Windows files, we need to select
‘Other’, go to your Windows Hard Drive, then Users, and select the folder with
your username. Vbox in my case. If you have several users, you can back up the
whole users folder. If you are unsure about if all your data is in the user
folder, you can back up the whole system. Just select the whole hard drive. But
this will backup a lot of unnecessary files. In the destination select the USB
hard drive where you want to back up the data. Be careful that you do not
select the flash drive with your Linux Mint system. I select ALU here, which mimics
my external hard drive here. Again, be very-very careful here, do not rush and
check everything several times. Then click forward, if needed you can add files
or directories that you want to exclude. I won’t add anything. Click forward.
Check everything again, and if everything is fine, press apply. In the end, you
should get a message like this. The backup is successful. Again, if you have
several partitions, for example, disk C and disk D, backup each of them.
Installing Linux Mint
is very easy. Boot from the USB drive. I have shown how to boot from a USB in
the section Make a bootable USB. Go back to this section and watch it again if
you missed it. Then double click on Install Linux Mint. The first option is to
select the language. I keep it English, but you are free to change it if you
are more comfortable with another language. Continue. Here you are suggested to
install some third party software. This is just some Licensing issue, and Linux
Mint team cannot include this software by default. Do not worry too much about
it. Select to install it. You will most likely need this software. For example,
It includes mp3 codes, which you need to listen to music. This is the most
important part. You need to decide where you want to install your Linux Mint and
how to partition your hard drive.
The first option is to install Linux Mint
alongside your Windows. You can choose this option if you really need to
dualboot Linux and Windows. I am against this option because it often causes
issues. But I understand that some people can not give up on Windows. You can
proceed with it, but keep in mind that it is not the best option in terms of
performance and reliability. The second option is to Erase the disk and install
Linux Mint. This is what I recommend for the new users. The installer will do
everything for you. And this set up is quite good. It will create one large
partition with your system and a swap partition. The swap partition is required
for the case when your system exceed the amount of available RAM memory. All
extra things will be written to this partition.
If you install Linux
Mint in the UEFI mode, the installer will recognize itand it will create the
EFI partition too. I will skip the next two options; they are for advanced
users. The last option is also for advanced users, but I still would like to
show it. If you install Linux Mint with the plan to learn more about Linux and
you think that you will install other Linux distribution in the future, you
will benefit from manual partitioning. So, select “Something else” and click
“Continue”. Here we have my Windows partitions. I have backed up all the data
from this system and it is safe to delete it. Click “New Partition Table”. This
is a warning that all the data will be removed. I am aware of this. So, I click
continue. Now we have only free space. Select it. And click on the plus sign.
The first partition will be for our system. Its size depends on your
requirements. If you are going to install just a basic system with regular
programs like a web browser, office and media programs, 15 GB should be enough.
If you can afford, go with 20GB. If you want to install many
additional programs and especially games, then you need at least 30Gb. The more
the better. It is my test install, so I will assign to it 15Gb, which is
15000Mb. Keep it as primary, beginning of the space. For the file system, keep
it EXT4. It is a reliable file system. And for the mounting point, select root,
which is marked with a slash sign. Basically, it means to install the system
here. Click OK. Now select the rest of the free space and create another
partition. This will be our home partition, where all the user data will be stored.
It should be the largest possible partition. Take the size of your free space
and extract the size of your RAM memory. If you do not know how much RAM you
have, go to the menu and search for “System Monitor”.
Then go to resources and
here you will see the size of you RAM under the memory section. It is 2Gb for
me. 17Gb of free space minus 2 Gb of RAM gives 15 Gb. So, I allocate 15 Gb for
my home. It will be much larger for you, because as I have already mentioned,
it is my test installation. The logical partition type allows you to make more
than four partitions. We do not need that, so we make it Primary. For the file
system, keep it EXT4. And select home for the mounting point. OK. The rest of
the space we will assign to swap. I have already mentioned that Swap is used by
the system when there is not enough RAM memory. Make it Primary, and in the
file system, select “swap area” So, we have created the root, home, and swap
partitions. If you were not able to disable UEFI in your BIOS, you better don’t
do manual partition Chose the option to partition and install Linux Mint
automatically.
However, if you still want to do it manually, here is how it
should look. You simply need to create an additional partition and mark it with
the type EFI. Finally, check that your boot loader will be installed on the
same disk as your system. We have sda partition table here and the boot loader
should be installed on sda too. Install now. We are given the final review of
the changes we are going to apply. Check if everything is as you wanted and
press “Continue”. The installation process has started. While the system is
installing, we can do a few more settings. We need set the time zone. Select
the area where you live. I select Algiers, which is in Algeria . But you can switch
it to New York, for example. Press continue. You can change your keyboard layout
if it is not a standard keyboard. I keep it English US.
The final step is to
create a new user. Type your name. It’s Average Linux User for me. Then name
your computer. You can give it any name you want. It is a Virtual machine, so I
name it VirtualBox. Then decide on your username. It is better to make it
short.I will make it ALU.
Create a password. Try to make is complex enough that you get at least “good
password” on the right to it. You can select automatic login. This is a good
option for a home computer and lazy people. The system will load without the
login screen. If you are installing this Linux Mint on a laptop, I recommend
enabling the encryption. In case, you lose your laptop, nobody will be able to
access your private data. But be careful, if you forget the password, you want
to be able to access this data either. Select it only if you are paranoid or if
you will have sensitive data on your computer. For the demonstration purpose,
I
select to encrypt my home. That’s it. Now you need to wait sometime and the
system will be installed. If you do the installation in the UEFI, you may get
this error. It says that grub boot loader installation failed. Do not worry.
This problem was
mentioned in the release notes. Remember, we check this page earlier. To fix
it, disconnect the internet, reboot and start the installation from the
beginning but this time without the internet connection. I tested it, and the
system installed fine after these measures. When the installation is complete,
restart your system. You should get a message like this. So, remove your USB
drive and press enter. In a very unlikely event, your system may get stuck
during the shutdown, and you won’t get the message to remove your installation
media. It happened to me a couple of times. Do not worry, just remove the USB
drive and shutdown your system by pressing the button on your computer. Then
start the system again. I hope you will boot into your newly installed Linux
Mint system. After this installation, the system is ready for use. But I would
like to show you a few more things. After installation settings.
Linux Mint already
provides you a welcome screen with all the necessary information. You can check
it on your own. I am going to show you how to set up the update manager, how to
install drivers, how to enable the firewall, how to retrieve the encryption
passphrase and how to adjust the setting for your swap partition. How to set up
the update manager. You can open the Update Manager by clicking on this icon in
the system tray. And it already welcomes you with some suggestion. I think
Linux Mint team is too cautious, and they little exaggerate the danger of the
updates. Of course, you can select “Do not break my computer”, but I recommend
you to use “Always Update everything”. This will keep all the packages on your
system updated and thus secure. I use this option all the time, and I had no
single problem.
If you are very
afraid of breaking the system, choose “Optimal stability and security”. Here we
are presented with some updates. But before we update the system, we are
suggested to switch local mirrors. Let’s do it. It will make the download speed
faster. Enter your password. Select the Main Mirror. And wait for a few seconds
until the servers are ranked. Then select the fastest mirror which is on the
top. Apply. Do the same to the Base Mirror.
After these steps, reload your
cache. And close the settings. Now let’s install the updates. If you are curious
what is going on, you can click here and see all the processes. We have more
updates. And you probably have noticed they are marked with different levels.
These numbers range from 1 to 5 and mean how risky the update is. Firefox
web-browser is under the number 2, so it is safe to upgrade. But if you scroll
down you will see some updates with the rank 5. These are the key part of the
system. It is the kernel and related packages. You would not see kernel updates
if you selected “Do not break my computer”and they would not be selected if you
chose “Optimal stability and security” in the settings. Kernel updates can
break your system, but they also bring critical security updates.
There is
always a trade-off. Ok, let’s install these updates. Yes, we agree to install
additional packages. If during the update process you get a message like this, which
asks you if you want to keep old configuration file or replace it with a new
one Always select replace, unless you really know what you are doing. The updates
are complete. Keep your eye on this tray icons, if it is green, everything is
fine. But if it gets blue, it means you have some updates. Open the update
manger and install the updates. How to install drivers To install drivers, you
need to go to the main menu and search for driver manager. Open it. It takes
some time to update the cache. Then it should present you any available
drivers. I have some virtualbox drivers installed already. They were installed
automatically during the system installation. But I still have one driver
available. It is a firmware for the Intel process.
This firmware allows your Linux Mint system to update the
firmware of the processor. It should improve the performance of the processor.
Let’s install it. If you have a dedicated graphic card, any drives should be
shown here. Among the available options, I recommend you to use the proprietary
drivers. They usually work better. But free drives can work fine too. When the
drivers are installed, you need to reboot the system. Next is to set up a
firewall. Your Linux Mint system is secure enough, but you can harden it even
further if you enable the firewall. Go to the main menu and search for
Firewall. Open the Firewall application. The settings are very simple here. You
just need to enable it. It is very user friendly. You can change the profiles
between Public, Home and Office. They have little different layers of
protection. I usually use the Home profile.
Keep in mind this firewall may block the internet access for
some of your applications. If it is the case, you can enable these applications
in the Rules section. You can click add and select the application with the
per-configured rules. For example, we can select BitTorrent. And click add. If
you are little more advanced, you can enable specific ports in the Simple tab.
There is also an advanced tab, but I think people who use advanced tabs won’t
watch this video. Here you can see your new rules for the BitTorrent. If you
want to disable them, select the rules and press the minus button. You can also
read more about the firewall and the settings if you click on the home button.
How to retrieve the encryption passphrase. If you chose to encrypt the home
directory during the install, it is wise to retrieve the encryption passphrase.
This passphrase is used to decrypt the data.
Now, the decryption
happens when you log in and enter your user password. But your user password
and the encryption passphrase are not the same. If your system breaks, you will
need to use the passphrase to decrypt the data. Well, there is a way to decrypt
the data with your login password, but it is tricky. It is better to have a
passphrase.
To get the passphrase, open the terminal and type:
ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase Enter your
password.
You will get the sequence of characters and number like this. Copy or
write it down, and keep in a safe place where only you can access it.
Obviously, do not store in on the same computer. If something happens to your
system and you cannot log in, you still will be able to access your data with
this passphrase if you, for example, load the Linux Live session from a
bootable USB . The last step is to adjust the use of swap. It is the most
optional among all, but it may make your system little faster. Open the
terminal and type :
cat /proc/syst/vm/swappiness.
You will see the value of 60. This means that when the system uses more that
60% of your RAM memory,it will start writing the files to the swap partition of
your hard drive. RAM is a temporary memory; it is short from the Random Access
Memory. The problem here is that RAM is always faster than a Hard Drive. So,
when a system starts writing to a hard drive, it becomes slower. In this case
the system uses swap partition for that. Remember, I explained the swap
partiton during the installation part. We can force the system to use more
RAMand write to the disk only when more than 90% of the RAM is in use. To do
that, type:
sudo nano /etc/sysctl. Conf
Scroll down the file, and in the end
add:
vm. swappiness = 10
You can also
add the description for yourself that it decreases swap use. Then press the
combination of keys Ctrl+O to save
the file and Ctrl+X to exit from the
editor. Reboot the system. And check if changes have been applied. Open the
terminal and type the same command we used before. It should show 10 instead of
60. Now let’s go to the last step of this tutorial.
Restore the backup data To restore the backup data, you
simply need to do the reverse steps of what you did during the backup step. You
can either copy all files from the external hard drive to your home directory.
This is the best time to sort all your data if it was not sorted before. You
already have some categorical folders here like Documents, Music, Pictures, and
Videos. So, copy you files accordingly. If you need, you can of course create a
new folder.
For example, you can create a folder Linux and put there all your
Linux-related files. If you are lazy or if you files are sorted already, you
can move them from your external Hard drives to your home with Linux Backup tool.
You select “Restore files”, chose the option Directory, because we made backup
without compression. In the source you select your external Hard drive with the
backup data. And for the Destination, select your home directory. It should be
named with your username. I also suggest creating a new folder and restore
everything there. Let’s call it “data”. Later you can move the files where you
want. Click forward. Check if everything is alright and press apply.
In the end, your data should be in the data folder on your
newly installed Linux Mint system. Now you should have functional and reliable
Linux Mint system. And many users do not need more. However, it is Linux, and
there are many things you can improve and customize. In my next posts, I will
show the things you can do in Linux Mint to make it even faster. I will explain
how you can adjust the system specifically for you.
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