Per visiting the Linux Mint website the first step navigates you to a page that shows the three variations of Linux Mint: Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce
in short
- Cinnamon: is full featured
- Mate: Uses less resources so optimal for old hardware
- Xfce: lightest of them all
We will be downloading and installing the Cinnamon version of Linux mint bare metal and right after we get the ISO installed we want to go ahead and grab a software that can create a s bootable drive for us. I am going to be using Balena Etecher to create my bootable disk however before we do that, lets learn how to verify our copy of the ISO to make sure it hasnt been tampered with.
- Download the copy of Linux Mint Cinnamon (FYI I just downloaded it from Harvard School of Engineering)
- Verify the integrity of the installation (Tutorial)
- Create your boot drive using Balena Etetcher (Tutorial)
This part could vary from installation to installation, but the general steps are to reboot your machine into the BIOS. From there, navigate to the boot menu and select the thumb drive with your Linux Cinnamon ISO on it. (I went ahead into my BIOS and used Asus’s secure erase to wipe my other drives that had any operating systems on them. So when I booted up my machine once again, it immediately prompted me to the next step.)
We can go ahead and select the first option “*Start Linux Mint 22 Cinnamon 64-bit.”
We can go ahead and click on the Install linux Mint short cut at the top left.
LVM (You can skip reading this if you don’t want LVM)
Context
Eventually, I got to a prompt in the installer. The prompt simply asks whether we want to wipe a drive and install Mint on it. If you have another OS on there, it may propose a third option for you to install alongside an existing OS. Many recommend you keep your installations separate on different physical drives.
When you click advanced features, you will see options that allow you to select between the options listed below.
Up until now, I have yet to learn about what LVM (Logical Volume Manager) is, but I did my digging and have decided to try it out for this build. I will do my best to explain in another blog what LVM is useful for and why you may want to use it, but just know I have done it primarily out of curiosity to learn it. I will leave all the resources I used below in case you’re interested as well. For now, if you don’t want to deal with a new way of managing your disk space, I recommend avoiding it.
Understanding what is LVM:
LVM vs Standard YouTube Video by SavvyNik
To LVM or not to LVM A reddit thread that involves other peoples experience
LVM intro Tutorial A tutorial that explains the how to uses the basics of LVM
If anyone is interested in going down this path and doesn’t have much understanding or has questions, I can try to put together more resources. I also believe that someone who follows without using LVM generally shouldn’t have any more difficulties following along.
Lastly, if you choose LVM, you will have the option to enable encryption. This was a bit difficult to understand, but from what I learned, this is primarily useful if someone gets a hold of your physical hardware. They would need a decryption key to retrieve any of the data held on the drives. I’m going to choose to skip this option, but please feel free to help me understand whether this was a smart decision or not.
Now restart
And voilà, there you have it. Linux Mint installed. In the next blog, we will go over the Linux Mint Welcome setup. Thank you so much for joining me if you followed along. Hopefully, this was helpful to someone out there. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to leave them in the comments, but let’s all do it in the interest of learning.
