The Solution to the Expensive Windows Operating System and Microsoft Office. Linux Mint Desktop!
Step 1
So your tired of the high cost of software and hardware eating at your pocket-book. Looking for something that will work like windows without the cost of Microsoft Windows, Office, Outlook, expensive image and video editing software, and a great media player. You have come to the right place, you need to try Linux Mint Desktop.
The first thing you need to do is find the right operating system. Ubuntu is promising, however it is not very forgiving for the normal desktop user and functions very differently. After burning through several different Linux operating systems the solution to the problem was provided with Linux Mint Desktop.
Linux Mint Desktop is based on Ubuntu and is optimized for Desktop use. The Latest version of this software can be found on the Linux Mint Website at http://www.linuxmint.com/. The cinnamon edition is what this article will be referencing so please make sure you are using this version of Linux mint. The instructions for installing Linux Mint Desktop can be found at http://www.linuxmint.com/documentation.php.
Please Note: This tutorial assumes that you are proficient enough with computers that you can use the links provided to download the operating system, burn it to a disk and install it on the computer you will be using for Linux Mint Desktop. The procedures to complete these operations are located on the Linux Mint Website.
After you have Linux mint desktop installed you will need to install several different programs and scripts to create the same functionality that you have with windows 7.
Browsers
Linux Mint is distributed with the Firefox browser. For most people this will work just fine… other than it does not have flash installed. So if you want to watch that video from amazon prime you will have to do a little tweaking to get flash installed. First though let’s get some other browsers installed.
Chromium Browser
To install Chromium Browser on Linux Mint you will need to Open the terminal under the Menu. The Menu in Linux Mint is in the same location that the start menu is in Windows 7.
Type the following commands in to the terminal to install the chromium browser.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
Please note: By typing “sudo” in front of your commands you are asking Linux to process the command as root. This is the reason that you need to type in your password after typing the first command and hitting the enter button.
Chrome Browser
The Chrome Browser is a little easier. All you need to do is visit the google chrome download page at https://www.google.com/chrome/. Hit the download button and select the version from the four Linux versions available. If you have installed Linux Mint Desktop Cinnamon select the 32bit or 64bit version of chrome (64 bit .deb (For Debian/Ubuntu) depending on the version of the operating system you have installed. Hit accept and install and then follow any prompts that follow.
Opera Browser
Opera can be downloaded from http://www.opera.com/. After you hit download make sure you select open from the download dialog and opera package will open in the package installer after it is downloaded. Then all you need to do is simply hit install.
Flash
Next we need to get flash installed so go to the menu in the bottom left hand corner of your desktop and open the Software Manager. Enter your system password, type Flash in the search box and hit enter. You should see flash as the second option in the list, there is an image provided to the left that shows what this will look like. The only difference is the check will not be present as you have not installed this software yet. Select adobe-flash from the list and when the details page opens hit install.
That was simple huh! Well not so fast, what most tutorials do not tell you is flash will not work without a little help. We will have to open the terminal and add Hal to our Adobe flash installation. Please type the following commands into your terminal after you have installed flash. Also make sure your browsers are all installed prior to doing this.
Hal needs installed so that Abobe flash will update correctly.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mjblenner/ppa-hal
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install hal
Please note: Hal will make flash work in Firefox only, the rest of the flash installations are problematic so they will not be listed here!
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