Monery Does Linux
An Alternative OS for EveryoneHello, and welcome to my tutorial for installing Linux Mint Debian Edition. In this tutorial, we are going to take a simulated broken Windows XP machine, and give it new life in the form of a brand new Linux PC. If the machine your going to install Linux Mint on has any data on it, your going to want to back it up before you erase the computers hard drive since we are going to be erasing Windows, installed applications, malware/spyware/viruses, and any data.
The idea I had on this tutorial is that somewhere out there, someone has a perfectly good computer that is sick and tired of the nasty software that infects Windows powered computers. They have taken it to a computer repair shop, got a quote on repairing it and have decided to just replace the computer in favor of repairs. Well now you got an old broken PC... what to do
Well there are a few things you can do with it: Recycle it at a local electronics recycling facility, stick it in your garage and store it, or you can play with Linux and discover an entire different side of
computing where programs are free and open.
If your still reading I am guessing you wanna try the last option and I say Good for you! So lets get started with what your going to need and how to get it done.
Step 1: Obtain your free copy of Linux Mint Debian Edition
The first thing your need is a functioning computer that can get on the Internet that has a DVD burner, a blank DVD. You can download an ISO image of the operating system right from www.linuxmint.com
and burn this image to a disc. This step is perfectly legal since the software is free to download, free to give away and free to use with no restrictions. There are many versions of Linux Mint, and this tutorial will reference the MATE Debain Edtion frequently. There are a few reason I perfer this version. It is because it is what is called a semi-rolling distribution. In short, that means that there are no traditional version numbers. It is always being updated to the lastest version so your never have to reinstall short of a hardware failure. The MATE part of the version is the graphical enviroment that gives you stuff to click on to make the computer do what you want it to do. It provides the in my opinion the closest experience you can get to a Windows enviroment. I use this Operating System for my oldest to my newest PC and Ive never been happier.
Step 2: Installing Linux Mint Debian Edition
Once you got your installer DVD, put it into the DVD drive of your computer and lets begin. Most computers will check to see if there is a bootable DVD in the drive first, if not you may have to do some research on how to boot your computer from the disc you created, but this is usually as easy as pressing a button on your keyboard during the first screen that appears when your PC powers up. Once you get booted up, which may take several minutes, your be presented with the following screen
From here, the next step is to double click the Install Linux Mint icon on the desktop and be patient. It will take a few minutes for the installer to appear. If it doesn't appear in a few minutes, try right clicking and and choose open
The next screen will be to choose the language you want to use your computer in. United States English should be automatically selected and as you can see, there quite a few languages that it will work with. For those of us in the USA, simply click forward
This screen will allow you to choose your time zone. The way this works is that you pick the capital of your state. That way, you can make sure that the time on your computer will be set correctly. I live in Tucson Arizona, so I will choose America/Phoenix then click forward
The next screen is for your keyboard, a standard american QWERTY keyboard is set by default. If your outside of the USA, make sure to select the proper keyboard for your part of the world
This next part is for the first user account on the computer, the password for that account, and the computers name. Like UNIX, usernames and passwords are case sensitive so remember that if you make any changes. Unless you have a specific need to create a special computer name, I would recommend something simple, like I did here, once your done, click forward
This screen here shows you the hard drives that are installed in your computer. They start at /dev/sda. Most people will see only one hard drive and the primary one should be the /dev/sda. If you have a second hard drive, most likely it was installed as a storage drive and you should know what data if any is installed on it.
If this is an old PC your recycling, which is what this tutorial was written for, you should see something as shown above. NOTE: The following steps WILL erase EVERYTHING on this computer so if you don't have your data backed up, STOP RIGHT NOW and back up your data
As you can see, this 40 GB hard drive has one partition with a file system of ntfs. This is where your old OS and software is installed, we are going to right click it to bring the menu you see above and choose delete
A few changes we are going to make to this window will be Free space following we are going to change that to at least 2048 and File system will be changed to ext4 then click add
Now we have two items, the new ext4 file system that Linux Mint uses and 2 GB of unallocated space, next we will be making a second partition using the empty space so right click on the remaining space and choose new
the only thing we are going to change on this screen is File system is going to be linux-swap. Once you make that change, click Add
Now that all the changes have been made, its time to write them to the hard drive. This is done by simplying clicking the edit menu at the top and choosing Apply All Operations and clicking the apply button. Now the Apply button is the last change you have to aborting this process. Until now nothing that we have done has actually changed the computer so make sure your sure you wanna continue with this before clicking that Apply! Once the changes are done writting to the disk, click the close button that tells you that All operations sucessfully completed then click the Gparted menu at the top left and choose Quit
Now for some reason, this window doesn't automatically refresh so your need to click refresh to see the new file system and changes that we made
Now that we have the hard drive set up for Linux Mint, we can right click on the /dev/sda1 listing and select "Assign to /" option and press forward
The bootloader called GRUB is a special program that gets installed that make Linux start. The Default settings should be /dev/sda and should work fine for you so go ahead and press Forward
The summary page will cover all the important settings that you choose during the installation. Pressing the Install, will start the file copy process over. It can take some time depending on your computers age
At this point, just sit back and relax while the automated process does the rest of the work for you. Your also get a slide show talking to you about Linux Mint Debian Edition telling you some of the things you can expect to see
Now your all set, click yes and your brand new installation of Linux Mint Debian Edition
Do you want to see more Linux Mint Material? Have questions about how to do something in the Operating System?
Feel free to use the Contact form on my wordpress site http://hipotok1978.wordpress.com and ask aways
Cheers Monery
