Just me and my monolithic kernal

This is just a bare basics walkthrough to how to make a bootable usb from an iso, I'll be working with linux mint as I find it very user friendly and simply it's my favourite ready-to-go distro, (a wordy and not very exact post on selecting a distro), in particular Linux Mint 16 XFCE (List of download Mirrors 32bit 64bit - if unsure send me a message, or simply go for the 32bit one)

I'm making this thumbdrive on windows, but the software is available for Mac and Linux also, unfortunately the resulting thumb drive will not work on Mac's - This is my first attempt at using skitch to annotate screenshots also so I apologize in advance

Download, Install and Open UNetBootin

It's relatively straight forward, but none the less here's a short guide

 Make sure everything is correct, then double check, then click OK

You will then see a screen like this one

Don't worry if it seems to take forever, remember, it is copying and extracting then compressing again about 1.2GB

Eventually (I walked away and had a snack) you'll come back to a screen like this

And you should be good to go.

Reset your computer and get into BIOS, some computers have this in weird places, some make it easy, a lot of the time you have to press either one of the function buttons when the computer is in startup (so f1, f2 etc) or sometimes it's delete, on thinkpads there's a dedicated blue button to press, and then you need to find the option to boot using the thumbdrive, with some computers I've gone to fix they've put the thumbdrive under hard disks, also there's been some which plain refuse to boot off a thumb drive, but in 95% of cases it will always work fine, if a little slow because it's running off a thumbdrive

But before this I feel I should explain some things, Windows 8 with efi protection secure boot or what ever it's called, I haven't been able to work out how to install it and get it running off the hard drive, so for now, your only choice is to run it live, secondly, there's 2 ways to run linux live (off a usb at least, cd's are possible, but it's more work than what it's worth) there's Live, and there's persistent. the differences are as follows Live: You can do everything you want, you'll just lose the settings when you restart Persistent: Basically your thumb drive becomes the hard drive so you can save everything you need, although in some cases and configurations this is somewhat not recommended as the computer will be making constant read/writes to the thumb drive which lessens the thumb drives life.

Now that's out of the way, for a persistent linux mint xfce What you'll need: UNetbootin - This program will do pretty much everything technical

A Linux ISO of your choosing - I'm recommending linux mint xfce for this, but there's many others that are suitable (or you can use UNetbootin to get one) but I prefer to get mine and save them somewhere so if something goes wrong I can get them again, also for me I get them unmetered from here(Telstra) or a quick google search can usually get you somewhere "<your isp here> linux mirror" or something along those lines should work, it does in Australia at least with the major players, unsure about overseas though.

A usb drive - anything over 2GB is plenty - I could've sworn it was more, but I'm getting a bit of info from some forums now and it seems adamant most don't need more than that Method  Note, I would write this up myself, but this is just as straight forward and quite simple too: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unetbootin/wiki/guide The persistence thing down the bottom where it says ubuntu only, don't believe it, I've done it in the past and it's worked fine as a persistent system with mint, the persistence should be at least a gig if you're going to use linux off the thumb drive...

but! you can leave it as 0 if you are planning on installing it to the hard disk anyway

First thing you need to ask yourself is "What am I going to be using linux for exactly?" This might be something as simple as "Emails, Web Browsing and Office type stuff" it might be "Music, lots of Music, and videos, and pictures etc", "Education", "Religion" or just as an all-rounded system a little less bloated than Windows or Mac.

Second thing you have to ask, and partially more important than the first, "what can this computer I'm installing linux on handle?" Linux can run on anything from toasters to supercomputers, so don't take me lightly when I say it can run on anything.

Catch with both of my previous questions is that it doesn't particularly matter, it just means if you start off with a good idea of what you need and what the computer can handle, there's going to be less downloading and fiddling around later on, but now I'm going to dive into a little bit of the nitty gritty of it all.

Desktop Environments and Window Managers

For the purpose of simplicity I'll say that these are the same things except that desktop environments are usually a lot larger and use more ram than window managers, but in essence, these are what handle everything you tell the computer to do, it's what lets you launch programs and sets the desktop wallpaper, it's what takes the fact that you are moving the mouse and shows this on screen, it's basically what you interact with. I'm just going to give my recommendations to a few different ones and hopefully when looking at a large list of iso's you can think of these and it will hopefully help with a choice

XFCE - Lightweight but plenty of features, my current window manager

Gnome 3 - Personally not a fan, but probably wouldn't be too bad as a first linux desktop environment, from what I know, lots of people who have been using linux for quite some time don't like it and prefer mate (which is a fork of Gnome 2)

Fluxbox - Lightweight but probably not quite as practical as XFCE, has a few nice little features I love

KDE - It feels very Mac-like to me, just how it looks also, lots and lots of eye candy, but uses a lot of resources

Cinnamon - Another fork of Gnome 2 made by the linux mint team, one of my favourites, good balance between speed, looks and functionality (Looks better than mate [again, in my opinion] but uses more resources)

Unity - The default Ubuntu desktop environment, I dislike it with a passion, others like it

And secondly with a distribution there's the community and support, because things will go wrong and you will be confused, but as long as you use google, you'll be fine, honestly. but the ones with the best support in my mind are

Linux Mint - If I've ever had a problem, their forums are the first place I go (partially because I use linux mint)

Ubuntu Forums - The second place I go, because mint is based of ubuntu so a lot of fixes work on both

The Arch Wiki, It's a wonderful place to learn more about particular programs I found, also it's absolutely fantastic if you're running arch obviously

So I'll boil it down to a few reccomendations

Linux Mint XFCE - It's near on perfect for everyday use, Lots of support, and it's lightweight, the cinnamon version is equally good but doesn't quite seem to have the "Log in, everything's done" sort of feel to it in my opinion, but I usually install the cinnamon version and then install xfce in later - probably come to this in another post one day

Fedora/Fuduntu - while sounding like ubuntu, fuduntu is based off Fedora and it is what I introduced my little brother to linux with, I was surprised at how quickly he adapted to it and began to use it on a daily basis, it may of been that there was no messing around to get the wifi to work, or it might've been it had a fair amount of eye candy, what ever it was it falls into my recommendation for computers with a bit of hardware in them

Ultimate - For those who have a decent computer and just want to go, it has everything I can think you'd need already installed, one day I'll probably commit and install it as my main linux os, maybe.

Ubuntu Studio - I haven't used it for about 3 years, but that was because when I used it, it was very very buggy on my computer, if I were to try it again I feel like I would be pleasantly surprised just going by how the website has changed

Elementary - it has a very sleak and minimal type feeling to it, I guess I recommend it to those who like kinda an elegant type of os, to me it's not quite ready to be used all the time though, but if all you need is a web browser, a custom media player that looks like itunes and eye candy, then go for it

Navigation: cd - change directory (aka change folder)

pwd - print working directory (prints the location of what ever folder you're in)

. - current directory (easy shorthand for /path/to/directory)

.. - the folder above the one you're currently in

ls - prints a list of all the files in the current directory *(I may do a more in detail post about this eventually)

File Management:

mkdir - make a directory, e.g. mkdir ./blah will make a folder called blah in the current directory

touch - make a blank file, e.g. touch ./stuff will make a file called stuff, this could be anything from a jpg to a txt

mv - move a file, also the only way to properly rename a file *(I will definitely do another post on this one day)

rm - remove a file, just a hint, never run rm -rf / on an unsecure unix box, it will remove all the files, usually you'll need sudo in front though, but yeah..

| otherwise known as Polon, Vertical Bar, Pipe or "That broken line thingy"

Another small attempt at me at making something which may actually make a difference somehow, I'll probably give up before the week is over and just rant at myself about commands and use this as a place to put things as I move from somewhere around a power-user up to a guru

How I found linux