An Introduction to Linux Mint 18.2

greetings and salutations and thank you for clicking on the video today we are going to do an introduction to Linux Mint 18.2 in this video we'll get back down to basic so I'm going to walk you through a quick and dirty install of Linux Mint 18.2 and I'm going to set the system up and we'll also take a look at the software that is available with Linux Mint 18.2 that will help you get started with Linux this video is designed for somebody who is looking at Linux and wants to get started with it I hope to cut through a lot of crap in this video there are a lot of conflicting opinions there's a lot of different information out there and if you have been researching Linux by watching youtube videos reading blog posts and all this kind of stuff you still might be sitting there going I'm not exactly sure what to do at this point Linux Mint 18.2 is definitely the best Linux Mint so far I have already upgraded most of my machines in my house to 18.2 I have worked with clients who run Linux Mint to get them upgraded or reinstalled to 18.2 and everything has gone really well this is a super stable wonderful release of Linux Mint and an excellent place to start if you want to get into using Linux there is a lot of negativity out there being aimed at Linux Mint a lot of other podcasters that I follow they say for one reason another that they don't use it and don't like it and that is because I think mainly Linux Mint is not aimed at the Linux nerd the hobbyist the developer that kind of person Linux Mint is designed for people who just have basic needs and want to do basic things with their computers now that does not mean that you can install Linux Mint and do everything with it that you could do with any other Linux it just means that the user experience is tailored toward the beginner or the very casual computer user if you are coming from Windows or Mac Linux Mint is a great choice and I usually tell people to go with the cinnamon desktop upfront cinnamon is a nice modern desktop and if you are used to using something like Windows then you're not going to it's not so unfamiliar that you're going to be like I don't know whether I could actually use this thing all the stuffs kind of in the same place and it's very logically laid out so we're going to be doing cinnamon today if you have an older machine that doesn't have a lot of memory in it not a whole lot of processing power it might not be able to handle Linux Mint with cinnamon they do offer the mate or matei desktop whichever one you want to call it also there is the xfce desktop that is a really nice implementation of Linux Mint I just did a couple of videos about that so today we're going to concentrate on cinnamon and we're just going to do a real quick and dirty install so the first thing they need you need to do is come to the Linux Mint page and before you click on download over here to get Linux Mint what you need to do is actually take a few minutes to read the official user guide because this will step you through a lot of the installation processes and it'll also give you an idea of how the system works it's not very long it's an easy read and I you know read the manual before you actually jump into this thing and a lot of questions will be answered in this manual so to get that you just come over here and you go to links and then it's available there and once you have familiarized yourself with the manual and you feel a little bit more comfortable with it you can come to the download page which looks like this and you notice that you got lots of choices here we've got cinnamon 32 bit 64 bit will have matei will also have xfce and KDE they're all listed right here and we're going to be choosing cinnamon 64-bit today if your machine was built in the last 10 years chances are it will very happily run a 64-bit operating system now there was some wisdom that was going around probably about 5 years ago that said well even if you do have a 64-bit machine you should install a 32-bit version that may have been true then it is not true now you need to have the 64-bit version installed because the 32-bit version is going to limit your choices for software 32-bit architecture support in linux is going away very quickly simply because the x86 machines with the 32-bit architecture are now getting to be really old and long in the tooth and it's fewer folks that actually want to be using them on a daily basis so you would choose the 64-bit version and then you would download it next step would be to burn that to a DVD a boot to make that a bootable DVD or you could use a USB stick I will not be showing you how to do that in this video because it depends a great deal on what operating system you're using to create that media there's also some things here about checking your md5 checksum to make sure that you are downloading that when you do download your big file there that everything is the way it should be that is something that you can look up in the user guide there's plenty of guides on how to do that so we're going to skip through that process today but you can do that as well so we're going to assume that you have a nice bootable DVD or USB and I really advise you to go ahead and create your own if you possibly can and the reason why I say that is because I have had many many people who have come to me who have bought USB sticks with Linux Mint already on them or bought DVDs and they don't work I don't know what the deal is with that it depends on where they come from who is selling them all that kind of stuff it's actually a lot more reliable to create your own if you can so let's go ahead and jump into actually doing it today we're going to be doing our install in a virtual machine because it makes it really easy to do a video about installing Linux mansi that's why we're going to do it but the steps are pretty much the same so it shouldn't be too much of a problem at all I have my ISO image hooked up to the virtual machine which is just like me dropping the DVD in the tray so once you do that you can go ahead and start it up if you attempt to boot Linux Mint and it does not boot and you have problems with Linux Mint booting then what you can do is to run it in compatibility mode when you see that little timer come up then you might want to try it in compatibility mode to see whether there's drivers that you would need to install you can also do a memory test here you can also check the integrity your installation media to make sure there's not any errors there that actually does an md5 checksum and it checks it out so you can do that before you burn it or you can do that after you burn it whichever way you want to go it does kind of the same thing with modern computers you are going to have to go into the bias and turn off a feature called secure boot and you can look up how to do that on the web just do a search for your particular model of computer and then tell it that you want to learn how to turn secure boot off and you should find a guide on how to do that it will not boot off another operating system if that is enabled if the machine has UEFI enabled then you can pretty much not worry about installing Linux Mint it is UEFI compatible it will go right into the system but you want to make sure that secure boot is off so let's go ahead and boot it up so once you get through all of that fun stuff now we're going to boot up Linux Mint for the first time if you are booting from a DVD this is going to take a while I mean long enough for you to go get a cup of coffee you know what I mean it's going to be quite a process that you're going to go through to get Linux Mint booted up for the first time on your machine but if you're doing it from a USB stick it goes pretty quick this video is being done from a file that's on a hard drive so this is going to be about as fast as it gets and this is what it looks like when the live desktop shows up now you notice we have an error message up here that says cinnamon is running in software rendering mode that means that it does not have the proper drivers yet we will take care of that after the install process so you can go ahead and just click on that message and it will go away everything's fine and then the first thing that you want to do is go through and check out to make sure that everything is working the way it should you want to make sure that your sound works if you have Wi-Fi networks available you want to make sure you get one hooked up if your Wi-Fi doesn't work out of the box with your laptop it may mean that you need to install drivers for your Wi-Fi card after you do the installation so so if that's the case just hook up an Ethernet cable and go ahead and install and then when you're done you should be able to install the drivers and I'll show you where we do that a little bit later on in the video assuming that you do have internet installed on the thing this is a fully functional system you can play around with it you can download things you can watch youtube videos all kinds of stuff it's just that when you actually turn the Machine off your configuration will go away now the one thing that I'm going to do is make our fonts a little bit bigger it'll make it easier for me to see and for you to see as well especially if you're watching on a low resolution device and the quick and dirty way to do that is just to scale the fonts but I would recommend actually setting your font sizes and leaving the scaling alone unless you have to use it we're going to make them like super big for this video so let's go ahead and do that so assuming that everything works the way it should your touchpad works on your desk your your laptop rather it's going to say on your desktop we've got a touchpad hooked to your desktop you might want to make sure that works as well everything is working and now you're ready to do your installation so go ahead and open up this nice little program that is sitting on your desktop this is the ubiquity installer which is used by a lot of distributions of Linux that are based on a boon too so we are going to open that up and the first thing we'll do is check you know choose a language I speak English this is very important you're going to want to check this box this will get your third-party software for doing things like playing back audio files flash things like that this will go ahead and install it on the system so you don't have to find it later we will click continue there now what the installer is doing at this point is it's checking the system out it's looking at all of the hard drives all of hardware on the system to figure out the best way to install Linux Mint this takes a few minutes this might sit here and go around in a circle for as long as a minute or two just be a little bit patient there the next thing we're going to decide is where to put Linux Mint now in this case we have a machine that has a blank hard drive in it it's like I put a brand new hard drive in the machine if you are reinstalling overtop of something like Windows or an old Linux distribution then you might be offered the option to install Linux Mint alongside it it will set up a dual boot if you do that you do that at your own risk I think the best way to start with Linux is to start with a nice clean hard drive and then move just have that machine devoted to being a Linux machine but if you want to try and do a dual boot be my guest they can be rather problematic especially if you are not somebody who is really computer savvy another thing that we need to talk about before we proceed here is the fact that if you do choose to erase everything on the disk and install Linux Mint that is the point of no return you are going to lose everything that was on that hard drive so make sure that you have copies of all of the files you want to keep there is no uninstalling Linux Mint there is no way to get back to your former installation if you blow everything out not going to happen so we're starting over here this is another reason why I usually tell people do not just take your Windows computer that you've been using and then blow it out and start over with mint you're going to be very frustrated the best way to get started is to get yourself a second machine go buy yourself a nice little laptop that's three to five years old one of those refurbished corporate laptops are awesome get yourself an HP get yourself a Dell and something like a pavilion g6 or a Dell studio or something like that that's three to five years old and Linux will just slide right on there I do not really recommend going out to the big box store and buying a brand new laptop off the shelf these days computer hardware is really designed to run the operating system that it comes with and so there are many machines out there now that only work well on Windows you can buy a new computer that comes pre-loaded with Linux usually with the bin - from companies like system76 Dell or HP and then might be something you want to look at definitely before you actually buy a computer you want to make sure that it's Linux friendly and like I said most little laptops Dell HP lenovo's that are maybe three to five years old they run Linux quite well you can just look that up online you can look for the model and you could say installing Linux on this machine and you'll get lots of feedback that way but we're starting with an empty hard drive here so we're just going to proceed and then it's going to ask us to confirm and in this case it's going to set up a partition for the system to live in and it's going to set up a swap partition it's going to do it all automatically now there are many Linux guides out there that will tell you how to create separate home partitions and separate partitions for other things on the system and there's lots of thoughts about whether or not you need swap and how much you need if you're starting for the first time which is what we're assuming here let the system make those decisions for you just move forward don't worry about it we want to keep it simple next thing it's going to do is going to see if it can figure out where in the world we are in this case it's choosing Eastern Time us I do not live in New York but I do live in the Eastern time zones we will move forward next this is your keyboard in our case the regular US layout is fine but if you are in another country like if you're in the UK the UK keyboard is slightly different you want to make sure that that is selected now it's going to ask for some information so in here we're going to put in our name go ahead and put any real name then you got to give the Machine a name it will suggest one in this case I'm just going to call it LM VM that's it and that is the name that your computer will be identified on the network as then it will choose a username for you your username is usually going to be your first name all lowercase you can make that anything you want it to be except that it has to be lowered case and don't think you can have any numbers in there so it's just all lowercase Jo is just fine now choose a password I recommend choosing something that is easy to type something short and sweet something you know well I have a standard password that I use for VMs some of you have actually seen that in my videos that you might know what it is okay so now you have these choices here do we log in automatically or do we require my password at login I always tell people to go ahead and have it require your password this is more secure this means that somebody can't walk up to your computer and boot it up and start goofing around with your stuff if it's a laptop and the laptop gets stolen if you have that set that means all they got to do is turn it on and they have instant access to all of your data so it's better to go ahead and put a password in place and to log in that way no it's not absolutely foolproof if somebody really wanted to get into the system and they had access to it sitting right in front of them they would but it's just a little extra step of security and it keeps prying eyes out now encrypt your home folder if you do that what that means is that all of the data that you save on the machine will be in an encrypted format and if you should choose to upgrade your operating system if you want to change things about your system later on then chances are you won't be able to do that without copying everything off of the computer making a backup and putting it back on it also does take away from the performance of the system because it takes time to encrypt and decrypt data I don't personally do it if you want to give it a try go right ahead but it might limit you down the road that's the main thing so let's go ahead and go on and now the system is going to install this process can take anywhere from ten minutes to two hours and it depends on your internet speed and it depends on a lot of things and yes you do need to have the internet up and running when you do this so that the machine will know what to connect to when it boots up to for the first time because in order to do updates and all that stuff then you are going to have to be on the Internet so there's actually nothing to do at this point it will take care of itself it's fully automatic and we're going to edit out the process of watching this thing installed and we'll come back when there is something to interact with on the screen that didn't take long at all this is the message that you're going to get and it is time to reboot the computer so we'll go ahead and do that if for some reason your installation doesn't work the first time after installing it do it again sometimes there can be a few problems that pop up during the installation process now once you get here you will remove whatever media it is that you installed from if it's a DVD it should automatically eject if it is a USB stick you can pull it out and press ENTER and if all went well during the installation process it should boot up for the first time from Linux Mint this is always a little bit of a tense process when it boots up for the first time even though I have probably done lowered thousands of installs so far I always get a little bit like is it going to work so here we go we are now at the login screen put in your password and if it's now setting up the cinnamon desktop for the first time so the first boot does take a few seconds even if you have a very fast machine and you're using a solid-state drive it might take it a little longer than you would think it would and that's just because it's setting it up so go ahead and clear that we're going to fix that in just a moment and we get our lovely welcome screen here and you can this will also give you access to the user guide and several other little interesting things we're going to go ahead and make that so it doesn't boot up automatically and go ahead clear it now the first thing I'm going to do is increase the font size just to make it easier for everybody to see including me and we'll go ahead and scale these up once again well make them pretty make it pretty large let's do 1.3 that's good now before you do anything to the system before you start exploring installing software goofing around with any of the settings or anything the very first thing that you need to do is to open up the update manager because we need to install all of the updates first and make sure that our system is completely up to date before we change anything else if you don't do this you might run into major issues down the road so let's go ahead and do that and the first thing that Linux Mint asked us to do is to choose an update policy and we get it in three levels the first one is just update software this won't touch anything on the system so you'll get the same kernel and the same system files and that makes it a little bit more secure if you're a newbie and you're not good at troubleshooting problems that might come along from that it is not the most secure setting you really want to be using the latest kernel then we have the intermediate setting which means that anything that will affect the basic system your going to get a warning first and you're going to have to approve what I have been doing with most of my clients is just tell them to install and update everything and I have had haven't had anybody come back and tell me they've had a major problem with it when I did my big video a year two ago now about when Linux Mint you know 18 first came out I did the installation video I was advising people to choose this policy but you can just go ahead and set it to update everything and now it's going to go out and it's going to check for updates and before we install them we want to choose our mirrors now these are different servers that are located around the world that hold the Linux Mint repositories and having one that is close to you means that it will be a faster and more reliable internet connection so the first one that we need to choose is for Linux Mint just click on that and the application here is software sources' and what it's going to do is it's going to go out and it's going to see if it can find all of the mirrors that are on the list and later versions of Linux Mint only show mirrors that are in your region which is really cool so we don't have a whole bunch of them now in my case I know for a fact that James Madison University is usually the best one to use and it's the closest to me so I'm going to choose that we're going to do the same thing for the aboon two mirrors Linux Mint is compatible with Ubuntu based on the Ubuntu system so we need to have access to the aboon two repositories for the packages that Linux Mint uses from a boon - and we're going to do exactly the same process it's usually a good idea to choose a mirror that is hosting both Linux Mint and boom - that way there is no risk of one mirror being more up-to-date than another that can cause some issues so I'm going to go ahead and scroll down through the list here and find James Madison University and it's right there so now we have updated our mirrors so once we do that we can close this and we will refresh the updates now it's going out I'm looking for anything that needs to be updated on the system this could take a couple of minutes we're not getting the greatest download speed from the J mu mirrors today usually it's a bit faster than that but it seems that anytime that I ever want to do a video they seem to be having one of those days when they're busy so this might take a couple of seconds for this to actually get itself together and then we will continue with the update process and it is got its updates so this should be popping up in just a second now the first one that it's going to want to update here is this little package that says mint upgrade info so we'll install that to install just click install give it your password now one of the great things about Linux especially linux mint is that one thing it will never do is actually install updates in the background and then shut your computer down in the middle of something that you're doing which is something that other operating systems do now linux mint will not do that the update process you are in control of it and you tell it what to do so now it has gotten its first little update and now we will upgrade the rest of the system it's warning us that there's a couple of extra things that will be installed that is okay asking for our administrative password yet again put that in there and now the update process begins how long this will take depends on your internet speed and it also depends on your hardware if you have older slower hardware installing all of this stuff does take a little bit of time and downloading takes a little bit of time and it's going to take a little bit of time for me today simply because my local mirrors they're running a little slower than usual so we're going to pause the video here and we'll come back when there's something on the screen for us to interact with updates complete and we get the check mark that means everything worked now if you get any error messages during this process then you might want to restart the Machine and try it again and usually that clears that up sometimes there's some problems downloading some things the very next thing that you want to do is restart the system another note on updates is that occasionally you might have a message come up that asks you whether you want to keep or replace a particular configuration file it's usually pretty safe to go ahead and replace those files because you do want the updates and it is very important that once the updates are done you go on and restart the system this will make sure that all of the new software that you installed is up and running for the next part of the process the next thing that we need to do is install drivers for our Hardware on our system and obviously we need some drivers here because we are getting a message that says that cinnamon is running on software rendering mode which means it's not operating to its optimal performance because it's not getting 3d acceleration from the video card before you do that open up a piece of software in here called synaptic package managers one setting we need to go ahead and change and this is one of the very few things about Linux Mint that I don't like is that it ships with this setting turned off and we really need to turn it on this will make sure that when we install software that we're getting all of the stuff that that software needs so what I did was open synaptic go to preferences and then we want to make sure that this is checked considered recommended packages as dependencies and that we'll make sure that if a piece of software when it's installed is calling on another program to add a feature or add functionality that that will get installed so we can go ahead and say yes to that and then close synaptic don't start installing software yet we're not ready to play around with that next thing we need to do is go ahead and install drivers so we can go to drivers here and we will open the driver manager and what this will do is it will go out and it will look for any hardware drivers that we need to make the system work and it will update the cache to make sure that we get the very latest drivers available for our system and as you can see we have many drivers listed and in this case the only one that I'm going to install is the Unicode for the processor and essentially what that is it's like a bias update that happens in the Linux system so if Intel or AMD has come up with some fixes for some problems within your processor that will make sure that loads that start up to compensate for that and it's a very nice little feature that has come along in the last couple of years for Linux that gives you the ability to fix a lot of problems now it also has these drivers installed and obviously they're not working properly so I'm going to go ahead and fix those so I'm not going to restart it just yet this is a virtual machine only type situation but you may have some hardware that in it you know you have to install drivers from a driver disk or something like that so I'm going to show you how that works so I insert the disk and Linux Mint finds it and then it sees that there is an auto run program on there I'm going to tell it yes I want to run that and of course it's going to ask for the password anytime you install software or change a Linux system it has to be done by an administrator and administrator password needs to be put in yes I do want to replace the current drivers that are installed because obviously they're not working the way they should this is the latest drivers that come with VirtualBox and it shouldn't take too long for this to install and once you get all your drivers installed you're going to have to reboot yet again to make sure that they're all running so there are several reboots in the process of setting up a Linux system so so far let's recap we've installed the system we have installed all of our updates we have checked the box and synaptic package manager that is going to make sure that we get all of the software that any program that we install on the system actually needs and we have installed the drivers so once again let us reboot keep your fingers crossed that the drivers actually work yeah it's very important to do those updates and drivers first don't have anything else up and running we want to make sure this goes as smooth as possible video drivers can be problem in Linux you can have those drivers not installed properly and then you go to reboot and it won't boot and that sort of thing if that happens to you reinstall it's really the best way to go a lot of times troubleshooting the problem and fixing it unless you are a Linux expert is going to take more time than just going through the install process and giving it a second chance now I know a lot of Linux nerds out there will say don't tell people to do that but it's the truth I mean sometimes just reinstalling is the quickest dirtiest way to go before you try and troubleshoot anything so we are now boot it up with the proper drivers and go ahead and check that disk that I had in there because the drivers are installed and notice that we had a color palette change that's just the way that the VirtualBox does it and now we can get into actually using the system and so there's a couple of things that when I want to show you when you open up your menu for the first time you notice that we have Firefox for a web browser a lot of you folks out there are probably going to want to use Google Chrome instead I'm going to show you how to install that right now just open up firefox and then do a search for google chrome just click it and usually the first one that comes up is what we want that says download Chrome today let's click go to download now and we will go ahead and choose to download we do want the 64-bit Debian installer here the dev file so yeah say yes we want that and we're going to go ahead and save the file I don't totally trusts just opening it and that should take a few seconds to actually come down while that is doing that let's take a look at one of the really nifty applications that come with Linux Mint is the software manager so if you need to find extra software that's not included in the system this is definitely the one you want to open up takes a couple of seconds to load because it has to go through all of its different things there and this particular application not only gives us access to the boon to software that you might already be somewhat familiar with but it also gives us access to the Linux Mint software and if we wanted to look for an application let's just type in music then it will give us pretty much everything that has to do with music and there's a lot of software to choose from in here feel free to you know play around with it let's go ahead and install a program this way so you see how it's done so I have a program that I know it's called a CH top and then I'm going to see it on the list here double click that it's going to give me a little description about it and then we can install it easy peasy it's installed on the computer the same thing goes for removing software you can find it once again on the list and then you can just take it off of the system so that's how to use software what if you install what if you want to install a package oh don't exit if we're still downloading figured it would be down here by now we're almost done running a little bit slow today the internet last time I did a video like this the Internet was pretty slow it's been pretty fast since then and haven't had any major issues it knows I'm recording a video that's what the deal is so anyway if you do download a dev package to install on your system let's go ahead and open this up and we'll go to downloads here is the package double-click on that and it opens up a nifty little thing called G Debbie which is the package installer and a lot of distributions of Linux these days don't come with GW installed they're using things like gnome software which far as I'm concerned don't do as good a job so we will open that up and it's going to scan the file and make sure that it can install Google Chrome it's going to go out and get any dependencies that it needs to install Google Chrome usually it has to download a file or two and this goes into what we did earlier where we told the system hey get all the recommended applications we can automatically close that when it's done and now Google Chrome is installed so now that we've installed it where is it well let's go find it we'll go into Internet and it's right there so we want to right-click on it we'll add that to favorites I just launched Firefox but that's ok what I want to do is go to favorites and you see that it's right there this is where your favorites list is then we just move that up there like that and now it's right up at the top of the list go ahead and close Firefox and now we can open up Google Chrome and you can go ahead and set that up you can sign in to your account make it the default for sure if you want to make Google Chrome default go right ahead not a problem and there you go Google Chrome is up and running so what software comes with Linux Mint anyway because I kind of put the cart in front of the horse there I showed you how to install software but we haven't really gone through with what's in the system well the idea is is that they give you one of everything to do basic tasks and it's one of the nicest things about Mint is that it is fully featured right out of the box so let's take a look at some of the software that's available here so the first thing that we're going to look at is Internet and the Internet software that you get of course you get the Firefox web browser I just installed Google Chrome we have hex chat which lets you talk to our C chat and it's nice to have that there if you want to get into the Linux Mint chat room to talk to people and get support there we also have an instant messaging program Thunderbird mail is included by default which is something that I really like transmission is a application that lets you download and share torrents with people and so that's under internet we have a lovely application here for working with photos called pics which will let you categorize your photos and do some pretty basic changes to them and then for more intense graphic work you can use is very much like Photoshop so if you're used to Photoshop give a try and then we also have under sound and video here we've got the media player which will pretty much play anything on the system and then we have rhythm box which is a very nice music player and it also handles downloading podcasts so if you're into that you can get that and then VLC media player is also installed VLC pretty much will play any format of audio or video file in the world and it has a bunch of other features in it as well so they give you some choices to play with here under media and then we have a lot of Linux Mint specific tools that are available here's where you can go into the preferences and these are the basic places that you will find things there's some features that you can activate to make this menu even more useful and you can actually download very highly customizable versions so now that we've gone through the software just a little bit and I didn't even bother to go through office but you get the entire LibreOffice suite completely configured and what's really nice is that things like your thesaurus and there's a basic set of plugins here that will make it work nicely it's a very good install of LibreOffice LibreOffice is an open source alternative to things like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office and I have actually been using quote-unquote Libre Office before I even switched 100% to Linux so I've been using that particular software for 10 years it's great let's go through the settings real quick here you can change your desktop background so let's find one we have several different things here you can also add like if you have a folder that is in your home folder that says wallpapers you put all this stuff in there you could add that to the list you can also just look at whatever some pictures of course there's nothing there now we haven't added any data to the machine but we can choose a nice wallpaper here from just here let's probably the one I like the best in 18.2 is right there so that shows you how that works and then you can change desktop effects you can work on your fonts you can choose different themes for your system so for instance the one that I really like and I use a lot is the dark theme let's go ahead and change this over to mint wide dark show you how easy this is you can change your cursor change your menu and if that's not enough for you you can click here and you can get more you can download themes and it goes out and it looks to see which ones are available now some of the older themes for cinnamon don't work very well in the new cinnamon but they've been doing a lot of work on that so you can go through and check all these different themes out and you can install them so if you want to theme your system up be my guest there's a lot available out there to do that we have accessibility options we can have a magnifier we can have a screen reader to turn on here account details this is where you can add a little picture of yourself or choose a little picture they give you some to choose from I always come I'm very vain and I always put my own picture in here but for right now we'll just put in the little astronaut and then you can change other things about this you can also change how the clock works so right now it's telling 24 hour time I like a 12 hour that's where you can do that let's see what else is in here printers usually are pretty easy to set up in Linux it's not really that much of a problem depending on whether your printer manufacturer has support available if your printer is plugged in and up and running if Linux Mint finds drivers for the printer it will install the drivers and if you are trying to make an old printer work and it doesn't then I would strongly suggest buying a new printer because it kind of works like this it either works or it doesn't there's not a whole lot of finagling you can do to get devices that are not well supported working and there are so many companies out there that have great linux support HP is one canon is another brother has some pretty good support for Linux as well at least that's what I have been told I always use HP printers so some other things that you can set your power management this will tell you what your machine you know how quick your display goes off and whether the machine actually goes to sleep and wakes up there are some other settings in here we have a screen saver setting now usually what I do with the screen saver is just turn it off but essentially it's the time that runs around the screen if you don't want a screen saver just go to settings here and then go ahead and tell it to never kick in and but I do like the screen saver to kick in when the computer wakes up because that way nobody can walk up to my computer and wake it up and then start getting into my stuff no screen saver will lock it and they'll have to put a password in changes to the panel this is what I normally do I like to have the panel intelligently hide and I put a bit of a delay on here for when it will show up so I want it be like half a second then it stays up and there's a little bit of a delay for it to show up you can also change the size down here so there you go make that a little bit larger there's all kinds of things you can do with the panel you can go in here and put different applets on it as well they have things called des clips which are just little programs that run on the desktop and they also have lots of applets and features for the panel you know I really don't get into all of that stuff there are some people who really go crazy about customizing these things down here but we've already taken look at the driver manager we can set up a firewall and the firewall that comes with Linux Mint is actually quite easy to use now if you are on a local network and your router is acting as the firewall you can just maybe not even bother with this but you know I go ahead and firewall my machines anyway just in case somebody gets into it and so all you got to do is just turn it on the home setting is great I'll be done in a few minutes and then I'll save you okay let's percy the cat you can go in here and set rules so for instance let's go ahead and add a rule let's say that we wanted to share a printer well the program that we use to you do that it's called cups common UNIX printing system so we'll make an exception for cups close this and now you see we have this rules kind of hard to see with the steam but it's there and so it will make it so that any we want to share a printer it can get through the firewall and there's another one that I usually set is SSH as well of course if you're just starting out with Linux that's a little bit more advanced stuff but there you go the software sources' this is where you can manage your mirrors and also any private program archives that you have hooked up to the system because linux mint is based on a bean - you do have access to the PPA system which means that you can get some pretty nifty software here and you know take your time to learn about how to use PPAs I have found that most PPAs work just fine with Linux Mint thank you very much I've heard some other people on the web say that ppas are problematic if you have the setting that I showed you how to set up where it makes sure that it gets all of the recommended packages then pph tend to work quite well thank you very much and some of the things in here that we won't get too deeply into and then finally users and groups this is where you can add other users to your system let's go ahead and add another user so I can show you how that's done very quickly so it's real simple this is your account right here and these are the groups that you were part of which is a part of the way that Linux especially a boon to based Linux figures out what you're allowed to do on the system so let's just create a new user and we'll call him Bob Smith and while beau Smith about Bob Smith yeah that's better let's just take that over mess that up all the way across there how does that young keep sticking thank you it's my fingers it's nothing wrong with the computer I tell you that right now Bob's a good username for a guy named Bob and we go ahead and had his account we're going to get him a standard account which means that he is not an administrator and then we can set a password for Bob usually this is going to want to have a pretty complicated password set for Bob it has to pick something strong so I'm not even gonna bother to set Bob's password to tell you the truth I don't even do it that way I do it through a terminal but I promised no terminals today so we've just set up that account now one of the things when you first create a new user and one of the reasons I want to show you this because you might want to set up an account for your significant other or your roommate or your friend or whatever the deal is they always automatically put them in no password login you see that which means that when the machine boots up it will just log them in automatically now that can cause some problems because the Machine logs into the wrong account before it shows the login screen make sure that you take them out of that particular group usually a standard user the only group that they're in is their own if you're new to Linux and you don't understand what all that is that's no problem you just make sure that they're not in the no password login group and I didn't even set a password for Bob now if you want to get rid of somebody that you've set up let's show you how to do that real quick - what since we've opened that can of worms so we go ahead and get rid of Bob which made us mad we don't want to deal with him anymore you can't use my computer I don't like you just to delete them it's going to ask whether you want to delete all their files well yes I don't whatever want Bob back in the system again but if you want to you can keep their file so later they can get copies now it's gone really that simple Linux Mint takes a lot of the complexities of Linux and may quite easy to use and it is a nice it's not the most simple simplistic system out there but it's also not the most complicated great place to start to learn about Linux gangue Linux Mint is wonderful now in the Linux community I do occasionally hear some negativity that has been leveled at Linux Mint especially lately and I urge you not to pay too much attention to it because most of the people who are saying negative things about Linux Mint are those who are more into the development side of things they are the hobbyists the Nerds and Linux Mint is really not aimed at them at all so this is why they're saying well Linux Mint isn't that great probably the second best distribution of Linux to get started with that I've seen is a boon to matei that's ma te it looks like mate but the developers call it matei or Matta depending on whether you speak Spanish or English that is a really great distribution to start out with and it's a more interactive experience they have a lovely welcome screen that comes up and it takes you through the process of updating the system and installing the drivers and had some very nice features in there but for people who are really just not into the whole interactive thing and they want a basic system that works well right out of the box Linux Mint offers a great place to start if you want to move on to a more sophisticated or more challenging Linux distro you certainly can but Linux Mint is a good place to start and Linux Mint 18.2 thus far has been really one of the best versions of Linux Mint that I have ever seen it has been very nice to work with and I have already upgraded it myself on let's see I've done three of my own personal machines in the house I have worked with several easy Linux clients people that I work with at various levels and they have done the same thing they have upgraded or reinstalled and I even installed Linux Mint 18.2 on my mom's computer she had been running 17.3 for quite some time and I've just kind of been watching the evolution of Linux Mint and so now she is on the newer version it seems to be doing quite well I haven't had any phone calls from her since I done it saying that they that you know she has problems that works out good okay gang I'm done that's your introduction to Linux Mint check out my other videos if you are brand new to Linux you're just discovering this for the first time I'm so glad you're here one more thing to show you why not try not to get too detailed and in-depth on this but there's another setting that you might want to take a look at here just to improve performance we have the start of applications here and you'll notice that we have several things that are coming up now we're running in VirtualBox so we definitely want that one to come up go ahead and turn this off I don't need that and then we have the mint Welcome which is what we saw when we first loaded it up we don't need that mint upload is a little thing for FTP servers and unless you're going to be using them you don't need it the Update Manager why of course we want that to come up and this will also automatically come up for standard users on the system that don't have the administrator privileges to install updates so for them you might want to go ahead and turn that off and then this is a nifty little function that lets you log out immediately and this is there in case you have a problem with your system you gotta lock up on your desktop or something like that this will log you out safely alternate control and backspace so I always leave that on it's a nice little feature that comes with linux mint and or something else that i wanted to show you very quickly but i guess that we'll just have to wait for another video there's a lot to discover in linux mint ladies and gentlemen a whole lot oh I know one thing I did want to show you we've done videos about this in the past remembered what it was now over time as you're using your Linux Mint system you're going to be getting new Linux kernels that come in so you open up your update manager I clicked on view and we look at the kernels and now we can see that we have several different series of a boon to kernels available Linux Mint 18.2 starts out with a 4.8 series and you see that we have one that's active and one that's installed this is an old kernel and you're going to get a whole bunch of these in here over time really you only need to keep the kernel that is active and the the last one that was known good so if over time you open this up and you notice you've got four five six kernels installed you can go ahead and remove those let's go ahead and remove this kernel to show you just how easy this is to work with so we'll say yes and put in our password and now it's going to remove that kernel easy-peasy if you take care of this the system will take care of itself the only reason that you really want to get rid of those old kernels is that they do tend to take up some space they also make updates a little bit slower if the system is having to update modules and things for five or six kernels you want to go ahead and just have one or two or three installs and you can expect to get a new kernel update once every two to three weeks or something like that sometimes it goes longer and it's important to have those installed because that's the security of Linux as having those new kernels in there a lot of times when you hear about these vulnerabilities that come along for Linux guess what the new kernel is already out just install it no problem now you're not going to have to worry about it it's one of the reasons that Linux is so very secure is that when these things are detected and found they're fixed immediately and your best defense is to be up-to-date no you do not need antivirus software on your desktop Linux computer just make sure it's up to date how cool is that all right I'm done thanks for watching do check out easy Linux on the web check out easy Linux on Facebook give it a like if you are a facebook type person also check out freedom punt and penguin calm for of really cool stories about Linux and if you have not done it yet grab yourself an old machine and put Linux Mint on it learn how to use the system it is awesome and it's a great introduction to Linux and we will do it again soon thank you for watching

Channel: Joe Collins

Views: 119,785

Rating: 4.9083967 out of 5

Keywords: Linux, Linux Mint, OS, Softwaree, Computer, Laptop, Desktop, Mac, Windows, Open Source, FOSS

Id: HhHu-1glWps

Length: 56min 12sec (3372 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2017