Getting Started with Linux Mint

[Music] welcome back to switch to linux well today we are going to do a getting started with linux mint video so this is for the new person who is just looking at different linux options now i did a previous one on mx linux hopefully this one is a little bit more refined we're working on the process on this but what we want to do here is we want to talk about getting linux mint installed we're going to do the installation and then we're going to do the first setups before you get into it now before we do this linux mint is my favorite linux distribution it has a good balance of everything's working out of the box and it is easy to use and it is familiar now this is where some there is certainly some we shall say personal preferences in the computing world some people have said that younger people particularly who've grown up on tablets and cell phones a operating system like or a desktop like gnome might make more intuitive sense but for those of us that grew up on old school computers and learned productivity in that method that's why i like the cinnamon desktop better and linux mint is the group who has created it so we're going to walk through the installation and then once it is installed we're going to talk about how to update it we're going to talk about adding and removing software we're going to look at the system notices and things like that so let's go ahead and get started in here with the installation process so as we start installing linux mint and i'm doing this in a virtual machine so there's going to be a few little things that that you won't be able to see one of those is going to be your um effects so the cinnamon effects the snazzy you know cute up and down windows those are not going to work in my virtual machine the other factor that's not going to work well what we're going to see is we're going to see a notice about software rendering up in the corner pop up several times that's perfectly fine so we're going to start by walking through the installer just click that open and then we're going to install the multimedia codecs because installing the multimedia codecs is going to allow us to play music videos and things just make sure that it is legal to do that where you are most places it will be you can choose if you want to install alongside what you already have or if you want to erase the disk and if you do select the erase disk and advanced features you can use lvm uh logical volume management and you can also encrypt the drive if you like there's something else that we haven't looked at here this will allow you to manually partition your drive and do things so we're going to go ahead and choose what we're going to do for our installation we're going to start by selecting your time zone i'm going to switch everything back to new york because of my channels eastern even though i'm not in the eastern time zone right now so we're going to enter in our name and our information so here's our password it's definitely not one two three and then once we go ahead and walk through that process it's going to spend anywhere depending on your system between as little as five minutes and up to like 20 25 minutes to get everything set up and installed so what we're going to do here is we'll be right back when the this is done installing now at the very end you have the option to continue testing or simply restart now i usually just out of habit i hit the continue testing shut it down and then remove the drop the virtual disk or if you're doing this on real hardware remove your usb drive cd drive at that point in time you can hit the restart button and and it'll prompt you to do that on the virtual machine and i think it might actually prompt you on the real hardware as well it's i install more linux distributions virtually than i do anywhere else so once it is installed we're going to go ahead and boot the system up and once we get the system all booted up the next step is going to be the the first thing we're going to do is we're going to change our we're going to change our packages to be pulling from a more local region to where we are and you can change these anytime if you go to run a software update and it's like can't find repositories scary messages all over just go into the software sources like we're going to do here momentarily and just change them it's possible that the route to wherever you are getting your repository is just down for whatever reason so we're going to go ahead and boot in we'll land on our land on our login window we'll go ahead and get logged in there's that notice about checking your video drivers and then we are greeted with this welcome screen now i don't want to see this welcome screen every time so you can turn off that dialog box but this also loads as a startup application so if you remove it from the startup application window and we're going to do that at the very very end of this video remove it from the startup applications it won't start either way even if it says don't show it and it's advisable to take it off in that startup applications because right now it's starting it's just not showing and that means more system resources so inside the welcome screen under our first steps we can choose our accent colors we can choose a light theme and a dark theme and then we can go with a more traditional older like windows xp type approach or we can go with a modern more windows 7 windows 8 windows 10 type approach there's system snapshots now for me i don't waste my time with system snapshots i know i am very comfort uh controversial in this we're gonna go ahead and talk about system snapshots in a little bit and why i don't um but right now we're gonna move skip that one for now because that's going to show up in our system notices we're going to look at our driver manager now so i click the driver manager it's scanning to see if there's anything extra depending on your system like on a virtual system it might prompt me to install guest additions for virtualbox you're not going to see that if you're doing it on real hardware what you might see is hey you have a weird graphics card you have a weird wireless card we found drivers for it not too uncommon that's going to patch up anything else that's not already embedded in the kernel and this brings us over to the update manager so clicking on on the update manager we do have a blue option up there to change our local mirrors this is the part i was talking about earlier the repositories is where your linux software comes from and there are places all around the world where you can do this and this option in here will actually go in and it will select it will show you how fast each of these are going now here in the united states i usually just stay on linux mint for the first one which is the linux mint specific software just because it usually rates itself up pretty high the only option that i do differently is i don't like downloading my repositories from companies i don't know why i just don't i usually grab mine from either some official repository from the distribution or i tend to grab it on something like i'll grab it from a university so here we're looking at the ubuntu ones you can see where where we're at now this is especially interesting because i'm traveling in my van around the country and so if i need to push an update it's very easy for me to go in here and change it to whatever's fastest that day now once you change those there's an option down there at the bottom to refresh the cache this is going to refresh your list of currently available packages to install now in linux some people talk about oh the terminal is scary it's really not you should learn how to use it you can run update everything in the terminal and it actually runs a little bit faster but linux mint has the software manager in such a way that you don't have to uh you don't have to bother doing that you can see the little shield in the lower right of the screen there the dot indicates that there is an update to be done so here we're just looking at the different software source options and usually before you push system updates there sometimes is an update to the manager itself always apply those it's going to download its package update itself and then it's going to refresh on the system and show you all of the packages available to upgrade now upgrading again can take anywhere from you know just a small amount of time you know a few minutes with a really good processor and uh and no uh you know a very small list of packages in this case this distribution is a few months old now so there is our substantial amount of updates that we need to do and so we're just going to go ahead and click our buttons there for um updating the software and then once the manager is done you can see that it has a lot more packages and so what we're doing is we're just going to hit the select all and apply all these now if i'm updating a computer that if i already have a computer that's well established i'm not always going to push up install everything every single time uh i'm going to see if there's anything in there that i might want to specifically hold back like firefox versions i sometimes hold back a few versions because of the weird things firefox tends to do from time to time all right now that our updates are done you can see the the shield icon notification is gone so that the square with the exclamation point next to that is our system reports this is or system error system notices is what i tend to call it the first one is a language pack who cares it's like hey you want to download a thousand other languages no ignore that one next one is your system your system snapshots now this is the part that's controversial for me reinstalling a linux distribution takes less time than messing around with this snapshots okay it's like when you write several pages of an essay and then you hit a wrong key and delete it and you spend five times more time then you wrote it and it takes to rewrite it to try and restore what you had i know it's a part of human nature where we just love to get in here and do this but the fact of the matter is i'm not a fan of system snapshots i think they take too many too much time too many resources and installing a linux distribution takes like 20 minutes it's not worth my time now i can understand the person who does and hey no qualms about it i don't care i think it's it's a very good tool i'd rather it's here and we not need it then it not be here at all but that personally is my take so with that how do we use the system snapshots well as far as if your system's not booting and if your system is not booting and you have a system snapshot you know how to install that i don't know look up online i don't use these things okay but let's go ahead and talk about how to create a snapshot and by the way i'll just say that that if there is a problem linux mint might very well prompt you to do that it's going to be a very simple step to restore from your snapshots but let's go ahead and walk through the process of of creating the snapshots so as soon as you open time shift or in this case we're just going to hit the launch time shift button from the system report screen what it's going to do here is it's going to first ask us what type of snapshot do we want do an rsync or you know our other options are just use the rsync unless you have a specific reason or knowledge to use the other option what it's going to do is it's estimating the size of the file system since i'm using just a 25 gigabyte virtual disk on my virtual machine the amount of free space versus the amount of space the snapshot is going to take is going to be a little bit tight so just keep that in mind so what we have here is um it's giving us the different options and the sizes what's free and what's used you can choose what type of snapshots so this case we're keeping five daily snapshots and then um i think it's keeping like one a week and then we're keeping five of those and then here we're deciding are we going to keep all of our uh home folders um and then you can do all files exclude all files or just do the hidden files and there are some other things you can do in there as well hit the button and it's going to start the process and then you will have snapshots over on the system back to the system reports on system information it's just a lot of information so if you happen to have a bug in your system and uh the bug in the system you're like hey i don't know what to do and you're seeking help forms people are like tell me what your system is you're like i don't know uh pull up that report hit that button copy that paste it into the answer that is everything the computer geek is going to need to know about your system to help you diagnose the problem there's the third option there which allows you to upload it to pastebin so somebody's like give us a paste me like i don't even know what that is just hit the button it's going to give you a link and you can paste that into the form you're seeking help these are all excellent tools to use so now let's go ahead and talk a little bit about what is in the menu we're going to talk about installing and uninstalling since i don't use things like redshift um i'm just going to use this to show you how to install something right click it from the menu uninstall done you can do it through the software sources as well but i find that this is easier and we'll get into installing packages in a moment we're just removing a few things right here you can actually move things around i have separate videos on that it hasn't changed in forever so it's going to right click on your menu icon configure the menu and then do it advanced options i have another video on that i'll carve that one here and so coming in here what you might want to do though is you might want to adjust how things are set up on your panel now again linux mint makes this easy you can right click and add things to the panel and then it will just appear down there you can also right click and add things to the favorites in the same way uh here you can add something to the desktop as well and there's the panel items so what you're going to do to remove them from your favorites that's that uh light gray portion on the side you can hit remove from favorites and you'll see that firefox has vanished so here i i can never remember where this thing is so it's called nemo let's just find it there right click and remove from favorites but let's go ahead and add a few things to favorites that we might want to use like transmission maybe we're doing some some torrents there or something so now you can add transmission to that i don't need the terminal on both the favorites and on the panel since i use it more frequently i'm going to keep it on the panel and not in the favorites but let's go ahead and add libreoffice to that there now also let's say i don't want rhythm box on the desktop well that's easy enough we can just go ahead and delete it from there and we can also drag from the menu down into the panel all right so the next step we're going to look at here is let's move some things around under your panel edit mode you can you can't you can move around the whole block of icons but you can't move the individual icons there you can do that when panel mode is turned off we'll show you that in a moment but panel edit mode allows you to adjust the height of the panel it gives you font size color icon sizes and things on each of the zones the three zones of the left zone the center zone and the right zone left zone is the solid red center zone is the green and the right zone is the purpley it looks kind of like ubuntu over there on the right and so you can go ahead and auto hide the panel you can always show the panel or you can intelligently hide it that's another matter of personal preference i always show mine but that's the way i like to run next thing we're going to do here let's just go ahead and grab the icons and drag them around a little bit now that last one there that's actually the desktop icon so oops turn panel mode back on we're going to drag that and i like throwing it down there in the right hand corner throw the mouse to the bottom click the button and you'll always show your desktop turn the panel edit mode off and now i will be able to drag and drop around my different icons all right so now we're going to start looking at some software manager so it's going to take just a moment to update the cache so we're just going to leave that aside for a second and we'll have a look at our system settings at the same time so inside your system settings obviously your background is easy linux mint has always had some of the best backgrounds there were so you can go ahead and just see what these guys look like they're all beautiful just pick the ones that you would like to use and go from there we'll go ahead and take the countryside select that you can also go up there into your pictures and anything's in your pictures or you can hit the plus down here and add any custom folder on your computer and then see a listing of all photos in there the effects this is the part that's not going to work on the virtual desktop but what you can do here is you can choose what your different items are then you can choose how they actually orientate themselves and the timing and things like that but you'll see even though i have the effect styles turned on even if i go ahead and minimize maximize things are just disappearing and reappearing instantly rather than using effects that's simply because the way my system my test system here is set up so we'll not worry about that too much so next having a look at your system themes you have a lot of different themes to choose from linux mint maybe in some ways gives you too many but under the add remove you can go online and download some more so just find one that you might want to use and hit the download button so let's see we'll take uh this dark theme here and if you scroll down to the bottom we actually have a windows 10 light theme let's go ahead and take those two themes with us so once those guys are installed go ahead and hit your themes and then head on down to your desktop looks like the it does give us the different the different elements so you can see here windows 10 buttons but there's no icons they did not give us windows 10 icons i'm a little saucy about that they are available you can go online and download them so just be aware of that let's hit the windows 10 window decorations as well there we are now we have a windows 10 looking computer there i am still a bit saucy they don't have the windows icons as well they are available you can download them and install them and let's go ahead and have a look at the other one we downloaded see there's the adora black and i didn't see um window controls with that so let's go ahead and use the the dark ones there as as much as we can so there we can change our whole theming fairly simple as well other system settings in here just a variety different applications here's the startup applications i talked about this mint welcome i always turn that off and if you're not going to print turn off your print queues if you don't have an nvidia card turn that off i personally turn off system reports i don't care i can diagnose my own problems you might want to leave those on in case if something goes goofy you can call all those applications that's just things that will start automatically also in here your preferred applications you can choose what different types of applications load with automatically when you click and you can also go up to the top under the removable media and every time you put in a individual item you can set what it does by default what does it open with what does it do and does it prompt you or not so that's what we have the only other thing i'll draw your attention to in here right now is actually going to be your firewall i personally keep the firewall turned off if i'm in on most my computers because my network has a very good firewall for my portable computer that goes around with me connecting to internet i do use the firewall option here where i'm going to cover how to use it but just be aware the firewall is there but it is disabled by default why is it disabled well of course it's disabled to prevent you from having a lot of hassle and problems with things that should be working but aren't all right so now looking at our software manager we do have flat packs and regular repository software in here so either one of these options are are going to be good and i personally go with repository first unless there's a very specific reason to use a flat pack so in this case here looking at caden live they don't give us a lot of the the details like what version of things are that's something this linux mint store does not get right most other software managers will tell you the versions of the software but we do have the we do have the flat pack and the repository versions so keepass xc um well this is keepassx um i should do keepassxc actually that's what i generally use um i'm just going to go ahead and install this just to show you how you install something just click on it it's going to prompt you for your password enter that and then you will be pretty much set to go so there is your getting started with linux mint hopefully this has been helpful for you to figure out how to get started and hopefully it will also help encourage you down the road to try out linux get away from all of the all of the windows and the mac and the spyware and all the other stuff the chromebooks and whatever else move to something where you do truly have control over your system it's not as complicated as some people think that it may be with that guys thanks for watching and hope that you enjoy switching to linux thank you for watching this video from switched to linux this channel would not be possible without the backing of the program supporters scrolling on the screen now you can be a supporter at patreon at patreon.com t-o-m-m or at thinklifemedia.com i also want to thank the open source community who creates such excellent software that makes producing this show possible please remember to support your software communities thank you and i hope that you enjoy switching to linux

Channel: Switched to Linux

Views: 5,442

Keywords: Switched to Linux, Technology, Privacy, Linux

Id: 7XxjvmXNzmg

Length: 23min 25sec (1405 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021