Feeling Minty Fresh

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For those of you who don't know (which is probably all 4 of you who read this with any regularity), I have an older Asus EeePC, with the 1.6gig Atom processor and 160gig harddrive. It's nothing special, but in a world that predated tablets, this little mobile maniac was my travel companion when storage was limited, such as when traveling on the motorcycle. 

Then tablets came out, but they weren't any more powerful and didn't have a keyboard. Then tablets became more powerful, but why did I need to spend more money on a tablet than I originally did on my netbook when my netbook worked just fine?

And then Microsoft killed XP for good. Okay, technically Microsoft didn't kill XP so much as they decided to stop supporting it with patches and security updates. So, I decided to take that very same netbook and replace the Windows XP with Mint Linux.

I've used linux in the past but , most recently to eek out a little more life from an old one core processing laptop. Mint came highly recommended from the linux community and from various article around the web about best options to keep XP machines running. 

Make sure your computer's BIOS is set to boot from USB before HDD

So, I downloaded the Mint 16 ISO from a mirror site. Turns out, in order to create a bootable USB one also needs to download another piece of software. I chose Unebootin. Why? Because it was recommended on the Mint forums and I'm not picky.

(For future reference, download the version -- Windows, Linux or MacOS -- based on the system you're using. In my case, I am using a Windows 7 machine.)


Once it's downloaded there's nothing to install, just double click and run after inserting the USB drive into the computer. Choose DiskImage and then search for the downloaded Linux distro wherever you downloaded it to on your computer. Then TYPE: USB ==> DRIVE: X (in my case it was "G") and then Okay.

Unebootin will make the USB into a bootable "live" disk. 

It's that easy. 

Reboot your computer or plug the USB stick into any other computer and boot.

From there you can run the linux distro off the drive, load it side-by-side with one of the Microsoft offerings or permanently replace Microsoft with linux. 

Although I'm not too thrilled with the speed of Mint, which seems slower than I was expecting for a OS that was designed to run on half the specs of my netbook. But, since I only use the EeePC as an internet device, watching YouTube, emailing, etc. I'm not overly concerned. Maybe, I will seek out other distros and give them a try.

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