There is a better way

[Corley]

Booting from a USB memory stick:

There can be some issues with booting from a stick. First, your PC's BIOS has to support booting from a stick. Most do, but some (mostly older ones) don't. You might find setting it in Bios doesn't do the trick, in which case you MAY find a boot option message flashed on the screen during the PCs boot up process that allows it, or there may be an "F" key option during the boot process that leads you to a menu for it. You MAY just not be able to do it on some hardware. I build old PCs up for people who cannot afford one, so I see a lot of different hardware, and have only seen two so far that were USB boot challenged. Next, since the Linux distro's core will be loaded into memory and not paged in as needed, you need enough memory in the PC to support that. Some distro's will run in 256MB, some require up to1GB, most will run in a 512MB machine just fine.

The PC hardware may not be your only challenge. Not all memory sticks are created equally, and some can't be used as boot devices. Don't ask me why, it's just that way. I have about 15 memory sticks, and of those I have 1 that cannot be made to boot. All the Lexar sticks I have boot just fine, so to be safe, pick one of those when you go to buy one (but I have several cheap Chinese ones that work just fine too.) Don't go crazy over size, stick to 1-4MB for size since some PCs don't support a bigger size. About $10 bucks will get a 2GB stick on sale, so don't go spending a fortune for one.

To create a boot stick, I always use a free program called UNETBOOTIN.EXE, that does most of the hard work for you. You first need to format the memory stick as FAT16, then run the unetbootin program. Unetbootin can either use an .ISO file you have downloaded on your own, or it can be used to download one you select from a list that it presents. (A .ISO file is basically a CD image file.) What the program does is to put bootable grub (a boot menu) on the stick along with the target .iso file. Once the unetbootin program is done loading up the memory stick and you have made the appropriate BIOS settings, you are ready to boot from the stick. When you then do the USB memory stick boot on the PC, you actually boot into grub, and from there select the target Linux system.

I've personally used this proceedure with about 20 different Linux distributions in "rainy day" playing around, and all have booted very well. (Most, but not all have run on my target hardware without trouble. Your mileage may vary...) The up side of using the stick is you don't have to burn a CD for each new distro. The down side is memory sticks are slow to write, so it can take up to 30 minutes to write the stick. Another up side is that you can reuse the stick to try another distro, but at the cost of CDs, that is hardly worth a consideration. Memory sticks are just another way to skin a cat, and easy to carry around with you in case you need to recover a crashed PC, or demonstrate Linux to some poor unsuspecting slob who happened to mention Linux to you. (Strike that last part.) The resultant USB stick or CD is called a "Live USB Stick", or "Live CD" since the PC will be running "live" from it when it is booted.

The great part of either method (Live CD or Live Memory stick) is that you can play with Linux distros to your heart's content, and never disturb the hard drive until you decide you are ready to do that (and at some point you will probably decide that you want to run Linux, either because you think it's better than Windows, or because you either can't afford or no longer care to afford the latest and greatest Bill Gates has to offer. JMHO) The important part is: You can skin these cats a number of different ways, why not experiment and have fun with all of them! Linux has gravitated from a geeky command line interface to an almost Windows like GUI, that just gets better and better, and easier and easier to use. It no longer requires a Geek degree and a bottle of whisky at your side to operate (Strike that too, it could be construed as a down side.)

Like I have said many times, this is just my humble opinion!

Corley

 

[Mike]

Linux has gravitated from a geeky command line interface to an almost Windows like GUI, that just gets better and better, and easier and easier to use.

Absolutely! When I'm just browsing the Web, you cannot tell if I have a Linux instance of Firefox open, or a Windows instance.

Here are some screenshots from Linux Mint 10 Julia -

There's one of the four desktops on this machine. The only edit I've done to this desktop was to move the Trash icon to the desktop, which took all of one mouse click to configure. Really geeky stuff, eh? Look at the bottom of the monitor and you will see a Windows-like task bar (which can be easily moved to any edge of the window).

There's a closer view of the left side of the task bar. The left icon allows me to navigate directly to the desktop, if I have multiple programs open. The menu icon opens up a desktop menu of programs. You can see I've an instance of Thunderbird and an instance of Firefox open, as well.

There's the right side of the task bar. On the left is a script that checks the weather at the Purdue airport every 30 minutes and displays the sky conditions and temperature. That took about 4 clicks to configure. The next icon shows I had Shutter (my screenshot script) open, the information icon is telling me there are updates available in the repositories to update some of my installed scripts, the wee black icon is Dropbox, the plug icon shows I currently have a wired connection to teh InterWebz, the rather odd-looking, round icon is a sound controller, then you see day, date, time and panels for the four desktops. I can click on any of the gray panels and immediately go to that desktop.

There's the menu, opened up. I have the InterWeb section highlighted, so it is showing me all my Web-related programs. If I wanted to open a word-processor, I could just hover my mouse over the Office icon and I would have seen all of those programs.

I tried to catch the Update Manager pulling in the updated scripts, but I had too much delay set in Shutter. The Update Manager has just finished downloading 846 KB of scripts and is just starting to run the dpkg database to upgrade the programs it had updates for. That's another tough job. Two clicks of the mouse.

Under Places, in the menu screenshot, one of the available places was the Home Folder on this machine. There's some of the directories (folders) in my home folder. I can create directories with any name I need and save files to those directories. Or, just like Windows, I can drag files from my desktop to a directory, or vice-versa. If I have a file in one of those directories and I want to work with a copy of it, I can just copy the file to the desktop, edit it to my heart's content and then save it back to its directory, overwriting the original file. (If you notice some smudged areas, I was merely smudging the folder name, which is also the username I use on this machine.)

I run Compiz, which will allow you to customize a lot of window settings. And there is one of the tricks Compiz can pull off, showing me what is happening on all four desktops at once. I only need to pull my mouse pointer into the lower.right corner of the screen, to see this view. move the mouse pointer out and back again and I'm right back to the desktop I was using. So don't think Linux is all about Command Line Interfaces, it has more eye candy than Windows.

Quite honestly, about the only real window customization effort I have expended was to install Emerald. It allows easier installs of custom desktop themes.

You can see I have selected the Mint-X-Metal theme for my desktop. But you can also see the button bar in that theme is background-color. I've installed the Red-Alice Emerald theme, which is what gives the red outlines to the windows.

Other than that, you are seeing Mint 10 Julia, pretty much as it comes out of the tin. And you can see it really doesn't take a computer science degree to use Linux. If you can find your way around Windows or OS X, you can find your way around Linux. It's the very same point-n-click environment you're accustomed to using.

 

[Mike]

Another Place available in the menu is the Software Manager. Nearly all the software you will ever install will be installed from there.

32,822 packages available in my enabled repositories. How much software does a system really need to have installed?

Let's say we see Skype on our list of wants. All you need to do is search for skype, or in this case, I found it in the featured software selections. Click on skype and...

...you will see this page, which will give you a bit of background on what Skype actually is and how big a download it is. In some instances, this being one of them, you can also see reviews from other users who have installed the script. If you still want to install Skype, click on the green Install button and Bob's your uncle.

See how "difficult" Linux is?

This one is a plus for some (not all, but some) Windows users who just don't want to give up certain Windows programs. You can run the programs under Wine, which is a Windows emulator. Personally, I do not use Wine, because the only Windows program I thought I couldn't live without wasn't compatible with Wine. I always used SmartFTP in Windows and really liked it. When i saw it wouldn't run in Wine, I was disappointed. But I was also determined to put Windows behind me, so I hunted around and found FileZilla, which actually works better than SmartFTP. But there are some Windows programs that will run under Wine, so it is an option.

 

[409T]

This is a great thread, I'm sure I am not the only one who is trying to move on from Windows because of it. Thanks to Mike and everyone else who has contributed.

32,822 packages available in my enabled repositories.

Are there repositories that are compatible with Mint that are not referenced in the basic installation?

Jeff

 

[Mike]

This is a great thread, I'm sure I am not the only one who is trying to move on from Windows because of it. Thanks to Mike and everyone else who has contributed.

I'm glad you're finding something worthwhile in the topic. I realize the majority of people who read this topic will stop after the first few sentences and continue using Windows. And that's alright with me. We all deserve our own choices. It's the knowledge that a handful of you will try Linux and will see there is an amazing alternative to Windows that makes posting to the topic worthwhile to me.

Are there repositories that are compatible with Mint that are not referenced in the basic installation?

The short answer is yes. The warning associated with that answer is to be careful with what you're adding. You can go from chicken salad to chicken sh*t in one click of the mouse. :blush: Been there, done that, still wearing the scars to prove it.

Linux Mint 10 Julia is a fork of Ubuntu 10.10, so you will find those repos compatible.

If you are using the Software Manager or the Package Manager and add Opera as a Web browser, the Opera repos will be automatically added to your sources list. The same holds true for a lot of programs. Take a look at this page and you will see a way to enable some associated repos, quite painlessly.

But there are also repos out there that will never be added, because there is no "official" association with them. For instance, I have added a repo that allows me to get constant updates to the browser I am running, which is a nightly build of Firefox 6.0. If I'm not mistaken, the standard repo will only have you at Firefox 3.6.17, or somewhere thereabouts. I had added a repo to get me Firefox 4.0, while it was still in Beta. When Firefox 4.0 was officially released, I was already bored with it, so I scouted around and found a repo that would allow me to get Firefox 4.2 Beta. (That's me, living life on the bleeding edge. :shrug A couple days later, to my complete surprise, I downloaded an update to Firefox 4.2 Beta and My Firefox 4.0 Beta Minefield version was suddenly Firefox 6.0 Alpha 1 Nightly version. The repo I added is a latest release repo, which means I vaulted from 4.2 Beta, right up and over 5.0 Alpha to 6.0 Alpha. People are all abuzz about Firefox 5.0 Beta, but I'm already running 6.0 Alpha!

You can add this repo to get the Nightly builds too, if you want. But be fully aware, you are adding Alpha testing software to an otherwise stable system and you might live to rue the day. Things can break. I'm pretty confident in this package, but having said that, my instance of Firefox could melt down before my eyes in the next second. Proceed with caution. I am not recommending or suggesting this to you and you are moving forward at your own risk, with the knowledge you could experience problems I cannot be held responsible for. :winkn: Does that cover all the "don't blame me if it breaks" bases?

Be aware the browser you will end up with is NOT branded as Firefox. It will be branded as Nightly. At the present, you can reasonably expect to receive an update to this build each day. I am currently running Nightly 6.0 Alpha 1 (2011-04-20). I've experienced no problems with it at all <touching wood>, but I do not run any Firefox add-ons. If you are running add-ons you cannot live without in a current version of Firefox, you will lose them by making this change. It's a little difficult for the add-on coders to keep up with base code being rewritten on a daily basis. :winkn:

Pay attention, because you are about to become a Linux Command Line Interface geek. :nod: Seriously, we're going to do this one the fast way, through the CLI.

Click on Menu and under System, click on Terminal. At the Terminal prompt, copy and paste the following (type if it you prefer, just type it exactly as you see it here) -

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa && sudo apt-get update

The Terminal is going to ask for your password, so type it at the prompt.

Relax, you're going to see a lot of things zooming past you on the Terminal window.

When the Terminal returns to a prompt, copy and paste the following -

sudo apt-get install firefox-4.0

Yes, I know, it says Firefox 4.0, but you are actually installing it from the daily build repo, so it is going to net you 6.0. You may not see it on the first run, it might install Firefox 4.2 Beta. But on subsequent checks of the repo, it will snag the 6.0 Alpha build. You will also note this will add a second repository to your list. You'll end up with the main repo and the main (Source Code) repo.

When the Terminal brings you back to a prompt, type exit to close the Terminal.

To be honest, I've no clue what repo to add, in order to install Aurora, which is currently Firefox 5.0 Alpha 2. As I said, I thought I was installing Firefox 4.2 and ended up W-A-Y ahead of the game.

You'll generally find the Mint forums to be all the support you need, but it's worth mentioning the Ubuntu forums to you. Here are their current stats - Threads: 1,593,497 - Posts: 10,107,586 - Members: 1,283,129 - Active Members: 52,096. When I was snagging those stats, there were 13,835 users on the forums. :faint: Nearly any information you pick up on the Ubuntu forums will apply to a Mint installation, unless it is Linux Mint Debian Edition, which is not compatible with Ubuntu. The Mint theme is green and the Ubuntu theme is coffee, but under the hood they both work the same. Mint is just a little more refined, that's all.