Download and Installation
Download an .iso file of your preferred Linux distribution. My favorites for a home PC are Linuxmint Mate or Debian with the Mate desktop. In the following I will focus on Linuxmint Mate and give some remarks on Debian.
Create a bootable USB stick from the .iso with the little program RUFUS.EXE in Windows, if you dont have already a Linux on your PC. In Rufus take GPT and UEFI as setting. Check that your BIOS lets you boot from the USB device. The key to open the BIOS on my Dell-PC is F2 immediately after switching on the PC. This may vary for other machines.
Check that you have disabled “Fast Boot” in your Windows (there in the energy settings, “some not shown”). Provide an empty partition in your PC for Linux. For this shrink your Windows partition in disk management, so that about 100-150 GB are free for a Linux partition next to Windows. Alternatively install Linux on a second internal or external harddisk. After the installation you will obtain a Dual Boot System for both operating systems and you can choose the OS from a shown boot menu in your screen.
Boot with that stick and choose your system language, keyboard layout, time zone, username and password and install Linux alongside with Windows or as a single system on a harddisk. The complete installation takes only about 10-15 minutes.
Customize your Desktop
a) By the installation you got already Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office, the Player Celluloid and some other software. I suggest to first customize your desktop as follows: Choose a nice background (right mouse click in the screen) and choose the Icons family and Font size that you like (Theme, Customize, Icons and Fonts). My preferred icons are the Mate or Gnome Icons. Use the Menu Control Center for Desktop Settings and more.
b) Customize Panels: You get a panel by installation – I dont remember whether above or at bottom of the screen. I suggest two panels. Thus add a panel by clicking right mouse in the existing panel and choose “add a panel”. Again with a right mouse click choose where to place the panels (above, bottom). Again with right mouse clicks in these panels choose Properties and then their width, color and transparency.
c) Place some icons in the panels for often used programs to start them fast. This can be done by right mouse click in the panel. Choose “Add to Panel” and then the application launcher of your choice with “Add”.
I suggest to place in the above panel: Workspace Switcher (Workspaces are additional virtual monitors, which I really appreciate for smooth and clear working, as many as you want with right mouse, properties, number), Trash Icon, and for groups the icons for Internet, Office, Sound and Video, Graphics to find fast the according programs in that categories. For the panel at the screen bottom (like the taskbar in Windows) I prefer the launcher for Firefox, Thunderbird, Filezilla, Terminal and System Monitor, Disks, the launcher for Forced Kill, Oracle’s Virtual Box and some others. You can see a screenshot of my current desktop here. After unlocking them (right mouse click) you can move the icons to places you like and lock their positions again. All that takes about 10-15 minutes and you get a desktop according to your own taste.
d) Customize the Filemanager Caja in Linuxmint: Open it and choose from the Caja menu “Edit”, then “Preferences”. I advise to use List View By Name, Show hidden files and additionally Group, Owner and Permissions as visible columns.
Additional Software Installations
As tools in Linuxmint you find for software installations a Software Manager and the Synaptics Package Manager. Both contain a selection of programs for Linux, which are installable by a single mouse click. You need to know the package name for that, found for example with a search machine or otherwise. Both repositories contain many thousends of packages for Linux. Thus, it’s up to you to find the software you need or prefer.
As a command line tool you can use the Advanced Package Manager apt, which is installed with Linuxmint/Ubuntu/Debian. It uses the Ubuntu Packages on which Linuxmint is based. In Debian you should check as administrator the file /etc/apt/sources.list to configure the desired repositories. With the program gdebi, you can also install downloaded Debian Packages “name.deb” by simple mouse clicks.
If you really want, you can also unlock the Ubuntu Snapstore by deleting as administrator the file /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref and add the snapstore repository by the commands “sudo apt update” and “sudo apt install snapd”. Snapstore also contains a lot of software packages, but is locked as default in Linuxmint since it is not Open Source. Thus you must trust in Ubuntu, when you use it. You can find it with this Link.
For installations in Debian Linux – again I would prefer the Mate Desktop – and its repositories edit as administrator the file /etc/apt/sources.list to configure your desired repositories (Debian Handbook page on that). To have available the firewall “ufw” and the feature “Open as administrator” in the filemanager install as root caja, caja-admin, the gnome-system-tools and ufw (when you copy&paste the following command into a terminal, check the two minus signs before the option “reinstall”):
sudo apt install –reinstall caja caja-admin gnome-system-tools ufw gufw
To enable Bluetooth in Debian use the command
sudo apt-get install bluetooth bluez libbluetooth-dev libudev-dev libcap2-bin blueman
To create a software selection in your system, which I often used for friends, you can download the according script for Linux-Software-Installation. You must make it executable (File Properties, Permissions) and run it as administrator with “sudo bash Linux-SW-Installation.sh” in the terminal command line or by clicking right mouse choose “run as administrator”. When it runs you must confirm the package installationss with Yes or Enter. Thus a good first software selection is rapidly in your system. Of course you can edit the script, add or remove packages of your choice. All this takes about 15-20 minutes depending on your DSL bandwidth. (When you download and save the above Script, observe that you save it with Unix/Linux line ends and not Windows line ends.)
Finally you should make your settings for the Firefox Browser, for Libre Office and your Preferences for the other Software.
Remarks on Some Other Topics
1) Check whether your printer and scanner work as they should. With a network printer you shouldn’t have any problems. For a USB connection you maybe need additional drivers from the vendor. For HP devices install hplip and hplip-gui with apt, which supports many printers of HP. For Brother printers download drivers as .deb packages from their homepage.
2) For Pixel-oriented Graphics Software the Linux standard is GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program), which corresponds to Photoshop in Windows. For vector graphics you can use Inkscape. For Video Processing you can install Kdenlive. It’s clear that all installed Software requires a certain time to become familiar with it.
3) Sometimes it can happen that you are working as root with the file manager in graphics mode, for example when you modify files in the folder /etc as root. It can happen that you move files to Trash instead of deleting it definitely. To prevent large files in the Trash of root, you must delete them by hand: Open a terminal and use the following commands:
sudo -i
rm -R ./.local/share/Trash/files/*
Best practice as a rule for working as root is to use terminal commands instead of graphics mode with the filemanager.
4) When it happens that you can´t boot anymore into Linux (maybe caused by Windows or from undetected large Trash of the root user – see above), you can try to repair your BIOS Boot Sequence or by rebooting with a second Linux installation on a USB device (which I have always available for the emergency case). Then check first how full your Linux partition is. If necessary, delete large files or directories. Then install there the program Boot-Repair, run boot-repair as administrator and let it try to recover your boot-settings. Afterwards try to boot again.
You can edit your Boot-Menu either with “sudo efibootmgr” with the wanted options or with the program Grub Customizer (downloadable from its repository, found with a Google query). A last option is the program testdisk to recover your partition table and boot. See the Link zu testdisk.
5) How to repair broken packages?
APT is the default package manager that comes preinstalled on every Debian-based distribution. Apart from APT, Debian and Ubuntu users can download and install packages manually using dpkg as well. Package managers like APT do not allow further installation if it finds a broken package on the system. In such a situation, repairing the broken package is the only option. You can try the following:
With terminal commands write (or copy&paste the commands from here into your terminal with two minus signs before fix)
sudo apt –fix-missing update
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -f
If the aforementioned steps do not work for you, you can try to solve the issue using dpkg. Force dpkg to reconfigure all the pending packages that are already unpacked but need to undergo configuration. The -a flag in the following command stands for All (again check two minus signs before configure, remove and force-remove-reinstreq, when you copy&paste):
sudo dpkg –configure -a
Pipe grep with dpkg to get a list of all the packages marked as required:
sudo dpkg -l | grep ^..r
Use the –remove flag to delete all the broken packages:
sudo dpkg –remove –force-remove-reinstreq
Clean up the package cache and install scripts using apt clean:
sudo apt clean
Reinstall missing packages.
6) It could happen, that you experience a Login Loop . This happens when you run the command startx as root in your user account. How can one get out there?
Ctrl+Alt+F3 –> Login in xterm with your username and password
ls -lah|grep -i Xauthority
Probably this shows root as Owner und Group and prevents your user login in graphics modesudo chown your_username:your_username .Xauthority
Ctrl+Alt+F7 –> Login-Screen and go on
If this does not work, again
Ctrl+Alt+F3
sudo ls -lah /tmp
sudo chmod 1777 /tmpI hope this helps out
7) Useful commands in Linux are “grep and find” to find files or strings in files and “sed” to replace strings in files. Example:
“sudo -i”, ” param1=”uuidold” “, ” param2=”uuidnew” “, ” sed -i “s/$param1/$param2/g” /mnt/to/boot/grub/grub.cfg ” replaces the old UUID of a partition with a new one in the grub boot manager. Over time, learn more on Linux commands with the manual pages for them (man “command”) or download a list of the most important commands from the internet.
8) Sometimes you perhaps like to use other fonts than the installed ones in Libre or Gimp. You can download other ttf-files of Fonts and place them into the folder ~/.local/share/fonts to make them available for these programs. (~ is your home directory, .local is one of the hidden files/directories there, which you can show in the filemanager by the key combination Strg + H).
Making a Clone of Your System with Penguins Eggs
You can (probably) clone your system with all your installed software (quasi as your own Linux distribution) as an .iso for a bootable USB device, a reinstallation of it or use in a virtual machine. For that install the program Eggs (Link to the Homepage of Eggs) by downloading the .deb package eggs_version_amd64.deb from that Link at sourceforge.net. It is the work of Piero Proietti in Italy. Install the package with a double click or with the command sudo dpkg -i package_name.deb. When installed, run it as administrator: sudo eggs produce. This will produce a system image as .iso into the new directory /home/eggs. From there you can bring it for example to an USB stick with the program mintstick, which is available in the menu of Linuxmint as USB Image Writer. When you boot the stick, you need the password evolution, and you can use the stick as a Live Linux or also install your system again from it with Calamares in the menu there or with “sudo calamares” in a command line. If you want additionally also your Home Directory cloned, then use the command sudo eggs produce –clone. The password then is your usual one. The kernel of the eggs installation date is used. When you use it later and have a newer updated kernel, then you have to edit as administrator the file /etc/penguins-eggs.d/eggs.yaml and set initrd_img and vmlinuz to your actual kernel number before starting eggs. You see your active kernel in the System Monitor. When your Linux distribution changes, for example from Mint Victoria to Mint Virginia, you also have to edit the file /etc/penguins-eggs.d/derivatives.yaml (see line 91 there for the above mentioned case) and configure eggs again with sudo eggs dad.
After finishing saving your clone .iso on another storage device delete the probably large eggs directory:
sudo rm -R /home/eggs. A new installation by an eggs clone takes only about 15 minutes.
Above I said “You can (probably) clone“. The reason is that in rare cases the produced clone USB stick may fail to boot. I didn’t definitely find out why, because there are no log-files at that state. I suppose, if the intended PC has an old BIOS, it does not boot partitions with more than 1024 cylinders. Another reason may be an interrupt conflict during boot. I’ve seen the kernel message “Disabling interrupt 11”, which is on certain motherboards an interrupt for USB devices and as a consequence the boot just from USB is frozen. I had this case once on an old notebook with a Linuxmint clone and a 5.15 kernel, while a Debian clone with a 6.1 kernel worked well there. With newer PC’s all worked as desired. Therefore make a clone and test booting it on your machine. If it works, you have an installable system backup and could very fast restore your complete system with all of its contents.
If you want to install Linux together with Windows 11 in your computer, I strongly advise to install Linux on a disk, which is separated from the Windows disk, either an internal second disk or an external disk. An nvme m.2 disk with an adapter at a USB3 interface is as fast as an internal SATA disk. During the installation, I advise to turn off or remove the Windows disk from your machine. Otherwise you can unintentionally run into problems with the bootloader Grub. Grub was not problematic alongside a Windows 10, but now it seems that Windows 11 is still more agressive. After installation reactivate your Windows disk, boot from the Linux disk, make “sudo update-grub” and after a reboot (with the Linux disk) you have a dual boot capability.
If that proposal doesn’t work with your hardware, you can try other backup tools like the program Timeshift in Linuxmint or the dd command for an entire harddisk (Windows, Linux and more; see the manpage of the command dd: man dd), which worked for me with harddisks of the same size and vendor. A further possibility is backing up your system with the program Clonezilla. You can easily find tutorials on that. Or you make a fresh install of your Linux distribution and software and restore your home directory from backups. That may take about one or two hours.
Installation and Use of Virtual Box
When you want to use an .iso or a virtual harddisk of an operating system like Windows or another Linux distribution, an option is to install Oracle’s Virtual Box. In Linuxmint you can install it with the Software Manager together with the according Extension Pack and Guest Additions. Alternatively you can download and install it directly from the Oracle Website. In Linux, the users must be members in the vboxusers group. It is a good tool to test other operating systems or development environments as guest machines without compromising your Linux host system. Once I tested (with a few difficulties) also an Apple OS as guest system, but came to the conclusion that a Linux fits much better my needs, since I do not work with Apple Software.
Provide a SHARES directory, so that you can transfer files from guest to host system and vice versa. That requires the VBox Guest Additions. You can easily find Youtube Tutorials for Virtual Box and there is also an online Help Manual. I’ll show on the next page in my submenu on Windows how it can be used with a virtual Windows harddisk.
On the submenu page Home Network I’ll give you some hints on installation of the FTP server VSFTPD (very secure ftp daemon) and configuration of a private Webserver with APACHE2 in your home network (daemons are background services).