How to install Mint
Get Mint booted, explore the live environment, then get this herbaceous powerhouse installed forthwith.
Hopefully, after a brief battle with firmware settings, your USB boots and you see this screen.
By this point, you’re more than likely eager to try out Mint for yourself. You might want to do that in a virtual machine (there are some pointers for running in VirtualBox at www. linuxmint.com/rel_wilma.php).
But you might also want to run it directly, which is easier and totally risk-free. The Mint installation image boots to a live environment that doesn’t touch your storage until you elect to install it. In order to get there, you need to figure out how to get your machine to boot the installation USB we created on the previous page (yes, turn back and do that now – you know who you are).
This usually involves pressing a key (often F10, F2 or Delete) as the machine turns on, in order to either summon a boot menu or enter the BIOS/UEFI settings and change the boot order manually. The process is extremely motherboard-dependent, but also some UEFI setups jump straight into the OS’s bootloader without giving you a chance to change boot settings. On Windows, you can get around this by holding Shift as you push the shutdown button and selecting Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > Firmware Setup. If you’re using Linux, there might already be a UEFI Firmware Settings option at the bottom of your boot menu. Or you can force the issue by running: $ sudo systemctl reboot –firmware-setup