Beginner's Guide to Installing Linux Mint 19

greetings and salutations and welcome to the beginner's guide to installing Linux Mint 19 I'm Joe Collins and I am going to take you through all the steps necessary to get Linux installed on your computer this video is aimed at new users if you are somebody who is already familiar with how Linux is installed you might find this video tedious but if you are a new user I'm really glad you're here because I'm gonna take you through the process one step at a time and explain it in great detail so that you understand what is going on each step of the way I have always said that somebody will stick with Linux if they get started with Linux the right way and the first thing that you need to have is a good solid install I have been helping people around the world get started with Linux for the last several years through a project called easy Linux and I'm saying this for the benefit of those of you who don't necessarily follow my channel you're brand new to the channel and I've worked with thousands of people so what you see in this video comes from my experience working with them now the first thing that I want to talk about is the computer that you're going to install Linux Mint on and this should not be the computer that you use every day to get things done I recommend that you find another computer to install Linux on keep your current computer running and play around with Linux and get confident with it Linux Mint is super easy to use but it is different from what you're used to if you're somebody who is coming from the Windows operating system or even if you've used Mac it's a very different system and it's going to take you some time to learn your way around so get yourself a test machine to play with I also do not recommend setting up a dual boot a dual boot is when you have Windows and Linux running on the same computer at the same time if you are somebody who is very familiar with how bootloaders work you know a lot about hard drives and the partitions on those drives and that's something that you're very comfortable with then maybe you can go on ahead and dual-boot because you're going to be able to fix problems when they come along however most folks most novice users they're not really into all of that and duel boots can get them in a lot of trouble if something goes wrong during the setup of a dual boot you can actually end up with a system that won't boot Linux and won't boot windows it won't do anything and the only thing that you can do at that point is to reload Windows and or Linux from scratch that's all you can do so if you're not prepared to deal with that here's what I suggest go find yourself a computer that you're going to make your linux mint computer that you're going to learn on and it could be an older machine that you don't use much anymore it could be a computer that you pick up refurbished off of Craigslist or Ebay or whatever the equivalents to those are in your part of the world any computer will do that's manufactured within the last ten years pretty much all of them will run Linux of course now the more memory and the more processing power you have in your computer the better it's going to run but you can get away with running Linux Mint on machines with as little as two gigabytes of memory and a dual-core processor it actually works quite well and most people when they have a machine that they have been running Windows on and they replace that with Linux they come back and tell me that they can't believe at the performance that they're getting from the machine now that Windows is gone so I just wanted to make that perfectly clear up front in this video today we are going to assume that you are going to be installing Linux Mint on a x86 computer not a Mac computer installing Linux Mint on a Mac is a different process there's more steps to it and I suggest that you go look that up elsewhere we're also going to assume that the machine you're installing too has one hard drive in it and we are going to wipe that machine and start from scratch so this will be a 100% Linux machine so if there's any data on the machine that you're going to be installing this on make sure that you back that up we'll talk more about that in a couple of minutes so the cheat sheet that you're seeing on your screen is going to be in the description to the video and you can follow the steps there you can copy and paste it and print it and do whatever you want with it the first thing that we need to do is create a bootable DVD or USB media and you do that by downloading an ISO file from Linux Mint comm so let's take a look at how that works we'll jump over here and go to download on the Linux Mint page and you see that right now it's Linux Mint 19 Tara now as this Linux Mint version grows you're going to see Linux Mint 19.1 19.2 19.3 in the years to come this is still probably going to apply to later dot releases of Linux Mint 19 just keep that in mind if it doesn't I will post a change I have done that so far with Linux Mint 18 and it's worked out quite well so be sure and subscribe to the channel if anything changes I will let you know so you just scroll down here and you've got some choices to make first of all you have to choose your desktop it can be cinnamon mate' I know that spelled mate but we say it mattei and then there's xfce cinnamon is the desktop that's pretty much standard with Linux Mint it is a desktop that they maintain themselves and I find it to be the easiest for folks who are coming from windows 7 windows 8 and windows type environment to kind of slide into it's very familiar it uses the same sort of start menu layout as microsoft systems the xfce and metate desktops they are good for low resource hardware but cinnamon will run okay on anything that has any accelerated graphics and like 256 megabytes of video memory on the graphics card so you're pretty safe to choose cinnamon the next thing you got to figure out is whether you're going to want to get 32-bit or 64-bit 32-bit is for machines that have a 32-bit processor in the cpu and at this point in time those are some pretty old machines so unless you are trying to install Linux Mint on a really old computer and you know for sure that you have a 32-bit processor choose 64-bit there is absolutely no advantage whatsoever in trying to install a 32-bit operating system on a 64-bit computer the conventional wisdom 5 or 10 years ago was that in some cases that would be a more stable way to go that is not true today if you have a 64-bit chip you need the 64-bit system so just double-click on that actually just a single click will take you here to where you can download that and you have some options up here as well one that you might want to take note of here is how to verify your ISO if you for any reason are unsure of that ISO and you want to make sure that there's no malware nothing's changed or it didn't get garbled when it was coming over the Internet you can follow the directions there to do that most of the time there's no problem whatsoever many years ago there was a breach of the Linux Mint repositories and a couple of their ISO images got replaced with some malware that has been addressed years ago you don't have to worry about now that now it's all pretty clean so a closed mirror to me would be James Madison University that's about 250 miles away so I can choose that one and then it will start downloading you see it's downloading here now of course I don't need this to download because I already have this but I did want to show you how the process worked these are big files they take a long time download do keep that in mind as well so let's jump back over here first of all let's put our webpage back so we have a nice background go ahead close the download thing we'll go back to our sheet here and see where we're at so we've downloaded our image and then we need to create that bootable DVD or USB if you have Windows seven and up you can simply insert a blank DVD and double-click the ISO file where it's downloaded to and the system will open up a window and it will take you through the process of burning a bootable DVD a USB Drive will require you to install software and I have a link to how that is done from the Linux Mint guide dot-org and you can check that out if you want to learn how to do that I'm not going to show you how to do it the video because it's going to depend on what machine you have what software you have downloaded and all that kind of stuff so once you have that what you might need to do with your computer is turn off a secure boot in your computer's bias setting if it will not boot and you're getting a blank screen or an error message this may be your problem this is also something that I cannot show you because every computer manufacturer does it differently secure boot is something that has been added to many newer computers we're talking maybe three to five years old and sometimes that will block it the system from booting off of anything other than the installed operating system so you might need to go in there and turn that off another thing that you might have a problem with is UEFI and you may want to take your system and roll it back to the old Master Boot Record way of booting up that is only if you have a problem Linux Mint works fine with UEFI and the way I'm going to show you how to set it up today it should just detect that and it will write that UEFI special boot partition and it will rock on and keep going but if for some reason you continually have a problem you can't get it installed you might want to roll that back as well so once you get Linux Mint 19 booted we've got to take some time to play around with it and see if your hardware is working properly we're gonna walk through that process here using a virtual machine today it is easier to show you guys how this is done in a virtual machine than to try and do it on real Hardware some people say well if you're doing it on a virtual machine it's not going to be the same the way I'm showing you it's gonna be exactly the same so let's go ahead and boot up our machine and I've got it set up and ready to go so this is just like you booted up your computer and you're gonna see a screen that looks something like that so we can go ahead and just press enter there and press ENTER again and it will go ahead and install Linux Mint or you can wait for that little timer to time out whatever works best for you do keep in mind that when you are booting from the bootable media that's gonna take a while to load it's in this file system called squash FS which everything is compressed and it just takes a long time to read and especially if you're using a DVD to boot your system DVDs take a while to get loaded up when they boot so don't be surprised if you have enough time to go fix a cup of coffee between the time you start and the time it actually gets booted up it's perfectly normal just let it go and if your computer should lock up hold down the power button for five seconds and try it again sometimes it doesn't work the first time around don't be freaked out about that if you get this message here that says that you're running in software rendering mode that just means that you do not have 3d accelerated graphics drivers that are necessary to display the desktop without using software to draw everything you see so the way it should work is that that should be passed on to your graphics card and that should be drawing things and this is shouldn't have to do it yeah running sentiment and software rendering mode all the time is not the world's greatest idea so what I'm gonna do is make this easy for everybody to see okay so I want to change the font size so I'm going to jump ahead just a little bit and put in fonts and I want to choose the second one there and I'm gonna make that we're gonna make it really big like make it easier for everybody to see and also what I'm gonna do is jump into the themes here in system settings like I said I know I'm jumping ahead and I'm gonna put it on the dark theme I like dark themes I think they're easier to see so I'm gonna go ahead and just set everything to mint why dark now you can put that on whatever you want to no big deal at all I just like this and a lot of people tell me that it's easier to see in videos so we're gonna go that way with it if you want to make that go away just click in the middle of that so while you're here as I said earlier play around make sure your hardware works make sure that you can hook up your internet if you have Wi-Fi on a laptop if the drivers are working right out of the box then you should be able to hook up now if they don't don't panic what it may be is that you need to install a proprietary driver once the system is installed and if you are in that situation hook up an Ethernet cable to your laptop and then you can install the system and once it's installed you can install the drivers that's coming up later in the video I'll show you where and how that's done every once in a great while you will end up with a situation with Linux Mint or any Linux where you have a particular Wi-Fi card in a laptop that it just doesn't work with and in those situations the best way to fix that problem is actually just to buy one of those little USB Wi-Fi dongles that does work with Linux and plug it into the machine I have found that no amount of downloading source code and trying to compile drivers works and since we are talking about Linux 19 which is Linux Mint 19 which has just been out for a days of the recording in this video there is no guarantee than any of that would work so don't even bother with it don't beat your head against a wall just get you a little dongle that will work but these days honestly most of the time it just works and no driver needs to be installed that's the vast majority of installs that I've worked with so once you're pretty sure that everything's good to go and you want to go ahead and install what you want to do is make sure that you go ahead and back up any data that you want on your Windows machine okay I even put that in here there is no way to uninstall Linux once it's installed you can't go back to Windows it's gonna wipe out the hard drive do not use commercial backup software or the built-in windows backup utility your files must be stored in an open format that Linux can read Linux will happily read NTFS fat32 any file system but you can't have your files in some proprietary format you can put them in a zip file Linux can read that with the archive manager so you can get your stuff out of it so if there's anything on that computer you want to keep you want to put it on a USB stick external hard drive burn it to DVDs if you want to go old school whatever just make sure that you have it off the machine because installing Linux will wipe the drive completely off it's also a good idea to have another computer smartphone or tablet available so you can have access to the Internet in case you need to look something up while you're doing that we've already talked about turning off secure boot we have talked about hooking your computer up to the internet with an Ethernet cable if drivers will be needed for while side Wi-Fi rather boot Linux Mint launched Linux Mint installer and follow the directions restart the computer and you are now running Linux Mint so let's see what that looks like let me go back to that I'd like to have that backup please thank you very much I wanted to do this none of these go perfect gang it's alright if it was perfect they'd have to pay me a lot more you know what I mean so let's go ahead and open up the Installer and we're going to install Linux Mint the first thing that you need to do is choose your language we speak English around here so that's perfectly alright then you choose the keyboard I have a u.s. keyboard that has a hundred and two keys on it or whatever yes so that's perfectly alright now this is a box you want to make sure that you have checks this in checked this installs a third-party software checks would be nice like you know like checks mix or check cereal I like that too but you want the box checked that's what I was trying to say this will make sure that those codecs get installed right upfront and then we'll go to the next option here now when you get to this point and you click on this this is going to kind of sit here and crunch for quite some time what it is doing at this point is it's checking out your system it's making sure that it can read all your hardware it's looking at the hard drives that are installed it's looking at everything and it's going to get you ready for this screen right here which gives you a whole bunch of options the one that we're going to choose is a rais'd disk and install Linux Mint you have some other options here if you were going to do a manual partition of the drive then you would choose something else we're going to erase and install so we're starting from scratch it's the least it's actually the the safest and most reliable way to go now it will tell you that it's going to create one large partition on the drive those of you who remember the Linux Mint 18 version of this video will recall that it also created a swap space we don't do that anymore Linux Mint 19 is based on a boon to 1804 and it will create a swap file that the system will manage so we don't have to worry about swap partitions on our drives with the latest Linux Mint now choose your timezone east coast is fine with me you can choose your timezone or type in the name of the city to get yours the way you want it to be put your name in put your whole name in and then as far as the name of the machine is concerned I'm just going to be real creative and call it LM 19 VM you can choose whatever you like it'll tell you if you have any characters that won't work for your username you can stick with what it chooses in this case it's going to call me Joe which is perfectly all right with me that has to be all lowercase and it can be numbers and letters but no spaces so I could put in there Joe see Joe won you that sort of thing you get the idea choose a password that is short but one that you will be able to remember easily and the reason why you want to do that is because you're gonna type it a lot when you're working with Linux so really long elaborate passwords they're not necessary try and come up with something really unique combination of numbers and letters that's not a real word those are difficult for people to figure out but like I said make it one that you'll remember and make it one that you don't mind typing a lot so you can also choose here to have Linux Mint log you in automatically I usually do not select that especially for laptops I like the system to prompt me for a password to log in and if you're going to be creating accounts for other users on the same machine you probably want to have that set up upfront as well but that's your choice and you can do that if you like I just don't usually recommend it and for me it's like if somebody actually gets ahold of the Machine I don't want to make it super easy for them to get in and look at your stuff you know what I mean so this installation process can take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour and a half it depends on your hardware and it depends on the speed of your internet can action because it does download some things from the internet as it goes along what we're gonna do in the video here is just gonna pause it and we're going to let it finish what it needs to do and we'll pick up when it's time for us to do something the installation is complete and this box popped up on the screen you can either continue testing or you can restart now we're going to go ahead and restart now always the most exciting part of installing any operating system is the first boot and you should get a message that looks like that this is when you will remove your DVD it should automatically eject or your USB stick go ahead and pull anything that is plugged into the computer out or remove your DVD press enter and the machine will boot for the first time into Linux Mint proper if for some reason you go through this process and it does not boot properly or it seems to hang up during the process don't be afraid to go ahead and try it again there's a lot of stuff that happens during these installations and if something goes goofy sometimes it doesn't work the first time around don't be afraid just to start over and do it again usually the second time around it'll work but sometimes it takes like three tries at it and after that if it doesn't work then you know hey there's a problem here and something you're going to need to address so here's our login screen put your password in and then we can jump in now we get into the part of the video where we're going to be configuring Linux Mint and the first time that it starts the desktop it may stay dark for that like it is now for a little while and the reason why it's gonna do that is because it's setting everything up in the background and then we get the welcome screen that pops up let me go ahead and click that to make that message go away and once again I'm going to jump into the settings are gonna jump ahead a little bit and adjust the fonts and change the theme so let me go ahead and get that going let's make everything except exceptionally large it makes it easier for you to see and me to see as well so 1.4 should be enough for art font scaling let's go ahead and back that up and I want to jump over here into themes and we'll put that dark thing back on mint why dark is definitely my favorite theme for linux mint there you go so will will probably end up jumping back in there for some other things later on in the video I'm gonna kind of show you some tips and tricks and things so what is really cool with linux mint 19 is now that in the welcome screen we have this lovely first steps section and they kind of take you through the process of what you need to do right after you install linux mint so the first thing that they want you to do is to set up system snapshots using time shift this will allow you to roll your system back to a former state this is like system restore in Windows and it uses a program called time shift to do this so what we're going to do is go ahead and set that up so if we did the you know regular install we got ext4 for a filesystem we're not using butter FS so we don't have to worry about that so just choose next here and now what it's going to do is it's going to analyze the hard drive on the system see how much space there is if you have more than one drive setup or more than one partition on that drive it's looking to see what that's all about so this takes it a couple of seconds to go ahead and just kind of go through and check all that out and the only place that we can put our snapshots is on the main drive because that's all we've got is that one partition and that will be perfectly fine so go ahead and click Next and then what I like to do here is set this to do what is called an M plus one backup so that is two monthlies and it'll be three weekly snapshots and then five daily snapshots and before you start freaking out going oh my god that's going to take up a whole bunch of disk space time shift doesn't work that way what time shift does is it creates a link farm it takes one snapshot and then it only saves the changes after that so you can have ten snapshots but in reality it doesn't take up nearly the space that ten snapshots would take up on your hard drive so let's move forward and then we're done it's telling you a little bit of how it works and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and take a snapshot and we're going to do an on-demand snapshot and it's gonna go ahead and take care of that and then we're gonna tag that and call it fresh install that way if at any point as we're playing around with Linux Mint we want to roll back to our original setup like right after it we installed it we can do that so we'll pause the video while that is taking place it does take it a little while to get set up time shift is taking its first snapshot and we're gonna add a comment to this just by clicking here and I'm gonna call it fresh in this software is called time shift it is up and running and if you want to go back to it later to see what it's doing then you can find it in the menu just by opening the menu like this and then typing in time shift for those of you who want to create separate home and root partitions in the past I have recommended 25 gigabytes for your root partition but now that time shift is here if you're going to be using that root partition to store snapshots which is one of the ways that you can do it you're going to obviously want to make that bigger somebody pointed that out 50 gigabytes should be enough or you can put it in your home partition whatever you want to do is fine with me and then you can keep an eye on time shift like I said by opening it up in the menu and you must have administrator privileges to manage time shift now that we have that setup and we have a way to get the system back up and running should we mess something up I'm going to go ahead and they have it in the order here that you should do your drivers next I'm not going to do that what I'm gonna do is go ahead and update the system I think it's better to install drivers after you run the first updates it just makes more sense to me now we no longer choose security levels with Linux Mint it used to be that this little screen would open up Linux Mint 18 and you would have to choose what security level you want it now it's everybody gets the same security level which is it updates everything so I think that's actually a good thing so just click OK here and then this is going to go out and it's going to look for updates to your system but before we get to that we want to set the mirrors for our system now what are mirrors they are different servers around the world that keep a copy of the Linux Mint and a boon to files and you want to choose servers that are close to you or fast which everyone comes first and one of the nicest things that Linux Mint does is provide this software sources' tool so when you get here just click on your mirrors for Linux Mint and it's gonna go out and it's going to find the fastest local mirrors for you so in this case it's recommending Clarkson University there or I can go with the Evo wise CDN I think I'll just go with that one go ahead and apply that really doesn't matter which one you choose as long as it's a mirror that's up and running and works and you do the same thing for the Ubuntu base of the system and it will go through and it's going to find different mirrors the ones that are closest and fastest to you this is gonna take a while there's a lot of mirrors on this list for a boon to we're just gonna choose you know whatever pops up just to keep things going pretty quick here so there you go Evo wise so we have the mirrors are the same and I've done videos on this if you're new to the channel you've never seen it before there's a lot of documentation about how mirrors work and I've talked about it as well so once you have chosen the mirrors the next thing it's going to say is you need to go ahead and update everything and so that's gonna do that right now you can click on details and watch this process take place and it's just gonna go out and it's going to check the mirrors this could take it a few minutes to do and every now and again you may get a warning that your mirrors are out of date or that you need to change your mirrors so it will just pop up with your update manager when that comes along so this can take a few moments for it to do let's pause the video alright that's complete so the next thing that we can do here is to go ahead and install our updates I'm gonna hit refresh again just to make sure that everything listed is what it should be and now we will install the updates while is it is installed do not mess with the computer at all because if it is updating parts of the desktop the desktop itself might become unstable so just go ahead and install the updates you can watch it work and then walk away it is not unusual for it to tell you that it's going to install extra stuff which is exactly what it's going to do here and the further down the road we are from the initial install or rather the initial release of Linux Mint 19 which just happened a couple of days ago as of their time of recording this video the more updates it's going to install the first time around so just keep that in mind so if you're installing Linux Mint 19 and it's a year from now for whatever reason you don't want to install 19 point 1 or 19 point to keep in mind there's gonna be a lot of updates that come down so this says it's going to take seven minutes to download the updates and then it will take some time to actually install the updates as well this process can take anywhere from just a few minutes to an hour once again it depends on the speed of your hardware the number of updates and the speed of your internet connection so it just takes a little while just be patient take your time but it's a very important thing to do install the updates to the system before you do anything else to it it really makes a big difference on what kind of experience you're gonna have when you start using the system while the updates are installing you can watch the progress of the files downloading by clicking on details here and you can see that it's going to bring in a lot of individual files don't be alarmed that's kind of the way Linux Mint works no big deal they're almost finished downloading the files at this point and it's getting ready to actually start installing the updates and one of the really cool things about that is that as its doing that you can watch it do its work this click on details when this little window pops up and it's a little show I remember when I first started out with Linux I used to love to watch this and I had no idea what it was talking about now I know a lot more about what it's talking about as it installs updates but to be honest with you not everything that is just about finished with the updates and then we can move on to looking at some cool features here in the update manager I want to show you guys simply because of the fact that with Linux Mint 18 a lot of folks were contacting me saying how do I manage my Linux kernels so I want to show you that real quick before we move on to something else while we're here especially if you have installed this on a system with UEFI enabled what you might end up with is a situation where all of a sudden the whenever you do an update like this the system comes back and it says it doesn't have any room to install a new kernel disk space is low but then you go back and look at your actual disk space and you say it's not that low why is this thing doing that it's simply because your little UEFI boot partition is full of kernels so to get rid of those go to view and then we go to Linux kernels and this will open up the Linux Mint kernel tool which is really cool you can opt not to see this message and you notice that we have one that is active that's the one we're running off right now and one that is just installed that came in with our update and once we get a whole bunch of these in here you're going to want to remove the older kernels it's a good idea to hang on to two versions of the kernel one that is the most current of course and the one back from that and that way if for some reason you have to manually tell the system know boot on the older kernel you can do that but any more than that it's just gonna take up a bunch of space caused you problems so now the very next thing that you should do is reboot the system and in my notes I only have this said once but really honestly you need to reboot after you install a whole bunch of updates like that so they'll take effect I'm not gonna do it just to save time in the video we're gonna move on to the next step here which is to look at how the driver manager works so the driver manager in Linux Mint will go and look for third-party drivers these could be drivers for your Wi-Fi this could be drivers for your video card it's very important that you get those installed you could have drivers in there for your touchpad there's all kinds of drivers that could pop up since this is a virtual machine it's going to recommend that we install drivers for the virtual machine I'm not going to do that in this video simply because it takes up time and I have showed it before but I will tell you that do not install these drivers from the driver manager if you are running a virtual machine what I suggest for virtual boxes that you go to the device menu and you insert the guest additions CD image and it will appear to the operating system to be like a CD and then you can choose run when it pops up and then you'll get a manual installer that will install the drivers that go along with the installed version of VirtualBox that you're using I'm not going to do that but you get the idea ok so we have our drivers installed go ahead and restart the computer at this point and then you can start putting software and to restart the computer just in case you don't know right there and then choose restart so the next thing that they talk about is system settings and I'm gonna show you a couple in here in just a moment or two but there are a couple of tweaks that I want to show you and this will help your system to perform better and make installing software a tiny bit easier so the first thing that I want to show you how to is to enable write caching on your drives in your computer using gnome disks the documentation on this that's not what I wanted we go back again let's the type the wrong thing VirtualBox is crashed and I have lost control of the keyboard this is a bug in VirtualBox ladies and gentlemen please hang with me while I take this out a full-screen mode there we go now I should have that there we go now I got the right thing disks so what you can do is open up disks choose your hard drive over here if you have more than one you'll see both of them and for your internal drive go to drive settings and then choose right cache and enable that and even if you have a solid-state drive do that now what that does is it makes sure that you are using right behind caching if the drive is busy reading and it has to write at the same time it will hang on to whatever you want to write to the drive in memory for just a little while and as soon as the computer becomes idle it will write that it can really increase the performance of a system now as I started to say the documentation on exactly what's going on here is a bit sketchy some folks indicate that this has already turned on and you don't actually have to do this but you will want to do that if you ever want to take manual control over it now when you have write caching enabled on a drive sometimes that can result in data loss if that does not get written to the drive before the machine is shut down let's say a desktop the power goes out then you do run a slight risk of losing some data or corrupting a file I personally have never come across that if you are running a laptop with a battery or a desktop with a UPS it will never happen but even in situations where you have a really hard crash I've never had an issue like that on Linux Mint or any other system that I have enabled it so I always like to point that out and yes for those of you who follow the channel when I did the video the other day where I installed a bin - I forgot to show you that sure did didn't didn't include it so it's a half dozen to one six of the other actually whether you want to do that or not if you want to gain control of that feature like I said it might be already be switched on and up and running that way it'll give you manual control so it's a good thing to setup now the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to open up synaptic package manager here and synaptic package manager has a setting that for some reason or another the Linux Mint developers says ship turned off that really ought to be turned on and no we don't want to see that again so you go to settings and then we go to preferences and the setting that I'm talking about is right here and for those of you looking on very small screens and you can't really make these fonts out my apologies it says considered recommended packages as dependencies you definitely want to turn that on and what that's going to do is when you install a piece of software to the system the developer of that software can list certain other programs as recommended to go along with it and so you may end up installing a piece of software and you find out that a feature doesn't work or there's a button on there that it's not showing up and that's because it depends on this other program and Linux Mint did not install it because it's not on the list of absolute dependencies programs that the program you're trying to install the ones that it really need other programs and other libraries it needs to run those are called dependencies while the recommended software that's just like extra icing on the cake and some developers they're not real clear about what is an absolute dependency and what is recommended so it's better to just go ahead and install all of it and then you don't have any problems and you're not installing software that you go why isn't this working it's half of the features are gone a good for instance - that was a couple of word processors out there that are in the repositories you install them and there's no spellcheck and there's nothing going on and you're like what's wrong that's why so we can go ahead and check that so let's let's look at configuring the system for a little bit we'll just take a dance through some of the different things that I usually hit on when I jump in here so the first thing that we'll look at here is date and time I've already showed you theming and I am not somebody who likes a 24-hour clock so you can make that an ampm clock by simply turning that off and then we'll go back here and let's see what else have we got here let's look at the screen saver real fast that is usually set up to come on what I like to do in Linux Mint this is just my personal preference but I'm just showing you is I turn the screensaver off I tell it never come on and the only time that I want it to kick in is after the computer goes to sleep so when it wakes up from being put to sleep then it will have a screensaver when it comes up and then you can put your name in there start up applications I think that's actually on my list these are things that you can turn off so they won't show up again like for instance if you don't want the welcome screen there's the mint welcome just turn that off mint update is definitely something you want flat-pack is something you want the rest of it is pretty much stuff that you need if you don't have nvidia for instance you can turn that off so that doesn't show up that's just your startup applications and yes you can add things for the desktop to start up there another thing that we will look at here is power management and with power management you could have it blank the screen after 30 minutes which is usually the way I set it up it's set to never auto suspend but you know I would usually set that for like an hour in a virtual machine we're just gonna leave that alone and leave it to never we can configure a firewall so let's go ahead and do that while we're here and it takes it a second to get booted up and we're just going to do a really simple configuration we'll leave it set on home we'll activate it and now essentially what that is going to do is anything that's trying to get into our computer that is not pre authorized in the rules it can't do it now that doesn't apply to things where you click on something on a website you want it to come in we're talking about like if you have servers running on the computer so if later on you decide that you want to set up SSH on your computer which I hope you do then you're going to want to create a rule for that so let's go ahead and click that and then SSH and it just warns us that hey we're opening up a port here might cause a problem when you go ahead and add that also if your printer is going to be share if your computer is going to be sharing a printer over the Internet then there's a something in there called cups so let me make sure I get that in there correctly yep cups pops right up so we want to add that so now we have rules in place for SSH and cups and with the dark theme here it's a little bit difficult to see but you get the idea the rules are there and so any other traffic that's trying to get into the computer will be blocked and with Linux you have to pretty much manually set up those rules great to have that set up for a laptop that you have you're going to be carrying in to like coffee shops or public Wi-Fi anywhere that will keep people out of your system so that is pretty much it gang this is an enabled system one thing I do want to show you because people have asked in the past so I'll show you at the end is how I get my panel to be bigger so the first thing that I like to have is a panel that will intelligently hide and then I set a time for that so let's see it takes the show delay that's when you move your cursor over it I usually set that to 250 milliseconds which is 1/4 of a second and how long it stays up I want it to be about a half a second so I put that on 500 and then I can make the panel larger here so now we have a nice panel down there so have fun with it you can poke around you can play with it you are now having a completely up and running Linux Mint we'll just take a real quick look at the steps here so I've showed you how to open up gnome disks and enabled right crash for all internal drives enable recommended plastic packages in synaptic package manager' configure the desktop and choose startup applications I showed you that oh let's install Google Chrome you want to install Google Chrome I'll show you how to do it it's all point-and-click and it's easy a lot of people ask about how do I get Google Chrome up and running when I am on the system because if we go into the software here I did want to show you that very quickly no that's not what I didn't want settings I wanted software which is right there thank you very much okay it's gonna take it just a second to get itself together you're gonna notice that even though there are thousands literally thousands of applications here available for free one of them is not Google Chrome a matter of fact there's not Google anything so to get that you have to download it I'm going to show you how to do that one of the very few exceptions to the rule of you know stay away from downloading software on your system with Linux look in the official repositories first that software application or synaptic package manager for the software that you need to install if you need something outside of what comes with the distribution then you do that first the last thing that you want to do is download anything and if you do download something you want to make sure it comes from a very well trusted source of course that is outside of the realm of this particular video but you get the idea so let's just click on Google Chrome and we'll go to the google page it says Google Chrome browser I went to download Chrome and it is going to open up this box and it's going to suggest that we download the 64-bit deb package for debian and a boon to that is what works with linux mint as well we do not need the RPM package for fedora and openSUSE now there is not a 32-bit version of google chrome as i mentioned in the early part of the video 32-bit support is going away and you should only use that if you absolutely have to in that case there's another choice and that is you can install the chromium browser and you can find that in the software repositories just do a search for a chromium web browser and it will pop up and it's the open source version of chrome it doesn't have every feature that comes with regular google chrome but most of them are there the Internet is taking a couple of seconds to download so I'm gonna go ahead and pause when we get the file here I'll show you what to do it's just about here now so once that shows up all the way after a few more seconds on the download of course the quickest way to make sure that my Internet's gonna run slow is for me to do a video and have to show anything downloading while the video is running so once you get it here we'll go ahead and close Firefox because we don't need that no mo we can close that as well and we're gonna open home and we are going to go to downloads which is where that file went and double click on it and it will open with G Debbie now Firefox will offer to open it automatically with G Debbie I don't like to do that and the reason why is that if something goes wrong God knows where Firefox puts that file I like to know where my file is and I want to keep it for later so we can put it in downloads so it checked it out and made sure that it could actually do it if there was a problem there was an error it would let you know so I've clicked install it's gonna ask for my password and had full screen this backup I've been recently had a little problem with the VirtualBox where it's in full screen like this sometimes the keyboard stops working I don't think I'll need to type anything else so we can leave that open full screen all right so Google Chrome has been installed give it a second to get itself together and you'll see reinstall package pop-up there that means it is there we can go ahead and close that we can close that as well you can delete that file if you want to and then all you got to do is find it in the menu there you go Google Chrome you want to add that to the favorites list add to favorites and or just drag it over here one of the two I'll do the same thing so there you go ladies and gentlemen Google Chrome is installed and then if you want to run that and set it up I'll show you the initial on that the initialization process it takes a long time to boot for the first time I don't know why this is something that's happening with Google Chrome lately is that when you first install it you click on it and even on a really fast machine with a lot of memory I don't know what it's doing in the background but it does take it quite some time to open up we'll just wait patiently for that as we run down the video I think I have pretty much covered everything yeah there you go just restart and have fun once you get things set up and there it is it popped right up so you can make Google Chrome your default browser if you want to you can automatically send messages back to Google anonymously telling them what you're doing so that they can make chrome better that's up to you I usually don't check that box and there you go and if you have a Google account you can sign in here and I'm not gonna show you that part so there you go ladies and gentlemen you have a fully functional Linux Mint have fun play with it you can't break it I could probably sit here and go on and show you tips and tricks for another half hour but I'm sure this video is now quite long so I'm not going to do that have fun discover it play with it it is a wonderful Linux distribution and if it's your first time using Linux glad to have you here well that was fun I guess we'll do another video like this when Linux Mint 20 comes along in a couple of years your feedback is always welcome give Easy Linux alike on Facebook if you're a Facebook user also check out easy Linux calm that's sort of the you know central clearinghouse for the entire easy Linux project lots of great stuff there also check out freedom penguin comm for more about Linux Matt Hartley over at freedom penguin is kind enough to send a cake the content from Easy Linux and that of a lot of other people as well and so it's it's a really nice place for a lot of practical information about Linux so you can check that out if you would please we will do it again soon thank you for watching

Channel: Joe Collins

Views: 282,790

Rating: 4.8228164 out of 5

Keywords: Linux, Linux Mint, OS, Software, Computer, Desktop, Laptop

Id: G0AFuhVSvEk

Length: 56min 11sec (3371 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 02 2018