Cinnamon Control Panel

Things To Do After Installing Linux Mint 20

Linux Mint is easily one of the best Linux distributions out there and especially considering the features of Linux Mint 20, I’m sure you will agree with that.

In case you missed our coverage, Linux Mint 20 is finally available to download.

Of course, if you’ve been using Linux Mint for a while, you probably know what’s best for you. But, for new users, there are a few things that you need to do after installing Linux Mint 20 to make your experience better than ever.

Recommended things to do after installing Linux Mint 20

In this article, I’m going to list some of them for to help you improve your Linux Mint 20 experience.

1. Perform a System Update

Linux Mint 20 System Update

The first thing you should check right after installation is — system updates using the update manager as shown in the image above.

Why? Because you need to build the local cache of available software. It is also a good idea to update all the software updates.

If you prefer to use the terminal, simply type the following command to perform a system update:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

2. Use Timeshift to Create System Snapshots

Create system snapshot in Linux Mint

It’s always useful have system snapshots if you want to quickly restore your system state after an accidental change or maybe after a bad update.

Hence, it’s super important to configure and create system snapshots using Timeshift if you want the ability to have a backup of your system state from time to time.

You can follow our detailed guide on using Timeshift, if you didn’t know already.

3. Install Codecs

To make sure that you don’t have issues with playing a MP4 video file or any other file formats of media, you might want to install the media codecs to make sure that most of the media file formats work on your system.

You can just search for “mint-meta-codecs” on your software center or simply type in the following command in the terminal to install it:

sudo apt install mint-meta-codecs

4. Install Useful Software

Even though you have a bunch of useful pre-installed applications on Linux Mint 20, you probably need to install some essential apps that do not come baked in.

You can simply utilize the software manager or the synaptic package manager to find and install software that you need.

For starters, you can follow our list of essential Linux apps if you want to explore a variety of tools.

Here’s a list of my favorite software that I’d want you to try:

5. Customize the Themes and Icons

Linux Mint 20 Theme

Of course, this isn’t something technically essential unless you want to change the look and feel of Linux Mint 20.

But, it’s very easy to change the theme and icons in Linux Mint 20 without installing anything extra.

You get the option to customize the look in the welcome screen itself. In either case, you just need to head on to “Themes” and start customizing.

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Make USB Stick

CREATE BOOTABLE WINDOWS USB STICK FROM LINUX

The WinUSB fork we covered a while back was renamed to WoeUSB recently, while also seeing quite a few releases for the past few days.

 

WoeUSB

 

WoeUSB / WinUSB is a tool that can be used to create a bootable Windows installer USB stick from an ISO or DVD. The application supports Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, as well Windows 10, and can be used either with a GUI or from the command line.
As for supported bootmodes, WoeUSB / WinUSB can create a bootable Windows USB installation stick using the following:
  • Legacy / MBR-style / IBM PC compatible bootmode;
  • Native UEFI booting is supported for Windows 7 and later images (with a limitation: only FAT filesystem can be used as the target filesystem).
Since it was forked from Colin Gille’s WinUSB, the application has seen a major code refactoring, bug fixes as well as some minor new features. The changes include:
  • support for both wxWidgets 2 and 3;
  • use pkexec instead of gksudo for privilege escalation;
  • UEFI boot support;
  • numerous bug fixes.

Some newer WoeUSB changes include:

  • support customizing the –label of the newly created filesystem in –format mode;
  • implement checking on target filesystem in –install mode;
  • command line: check if target media is busy before continuing and bail out when the target partition is mounted;
  • support Linux distributions that uses “grub2” as prefix name, such as Fedora;
  • –install and –format installation options are deprecated in favor of –partition and –device, to be more clear what both options will do. The old options will still be available until WoeUSB v3.0;
  • from now on, GRUB will pause when the ENTER key is used before starting to load Windows. This is useful if you want to see if there are errors in the GRUB loading stage.

Also, since the application name has changed, the executables have changed as well: “woeusbgui” for the GUI and “woeusb” for the command line tool.

You can see what’s new in each new WoeUSB release (there were 13 new releases for the past 2 days) on GitHub.

Despite the major code refactoring and numerous bug fixes, I still encountered an error using the WoeUSB GUI, which I also found in the original WinUSB. When the Windows USB stick is completed, WoeUSB displayed the following message: “Installation failed ! Exit code: 256”. This bug was closed on GitHub and it looks like it doesn’t affect the actual Windows USB stick in any way.

In my test, I was able to install Windows 10 64bit in VirtualBox (on an Ubuntu 17.04 host) despite this error.

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Install Packages from Source

Most modern Linux distributions enjoy standard repositories that include most of the software you’ll need to successfully run your Linux server or desktop. Should a package come up missing, more than likely you’ll find a repository you can add, so that the installation can be managed with the built-in package manager. This should be considered a best practice. Why? Because it’s important for the integrity of the platform to ensure the package manager is aware of installed software. When that is the case, packages can easily be updated (to fix vulnerabilities and the like). Another reason to install from repositories is that dependencies are easily met. When installing from source, you can sometimes find yourself trapped in a convoluted dependency nightmare.

Fortunately, repositories have become so inclusive, that it is rare you will ever need to install a package by any other means. However, you may find, on occasion, a reason to install from source. Reasons could include:

  • A package that is not found in any repository
  • A package developed in-house
  • You need to install a package with custom dependencies or options

When you do have to install from source, there are certain things you will need to know. Let’s walk through the process of installing Audacity from source on Ubuntu 16.10 (with the help of build-dep). Although this can be easily installed from repositories, it serves as a fine illustration for installing from source.

First things first

Installing from source used to be very common and also quite simple. You would download the source file, unpack it (with either zip or tar), change into the newly created directory, and then issue the commands:

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Install VMware Workstation 12 on Ubuntu 16.04 Linux Mint 18

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As we know that VMware Workstation is the most popular Virtualization software used at the desktop level on Linux like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It allows the us to create and run multiple Virtual machines simultaneously. VMware Workstation is not an open source or free software so we need to buy its license key, though we can use its trail version for 30 days then later you can apply its license key.

In this article we will demonstrate how to install latest version of VMware workstation 12 on Debian based operating systems like Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Linux Mint 18.

Follow the below steps to install VMware Workstation 12

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Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” Installation Guide

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Good News for the Linux Mint users is that the latest version of Linux Mint 18 along with Cinnamon and Mate desktop environment has been released on 30th June 2016. Code name for Linux Mint 18 is “Sarah” and it is released under Long Term Support(LTS) and will get support until 2021. Some of the new features noticed in Linux Mint 18 are listed below :

  • Linux Mint 18 released with two Desktop Environments : Cinnamon and Mate
  • Latest version of Cinnamon Desktop “3.0”
  • New Kernel Version 4.4
  • Introduction of X-Apps which will allow users to use applications which are based on traditional GTK desktop.
  • Improved Xed(default text editor) and Xviewer (Image viewer)
  • Xreader – PDF and document viewer software.
  • Xplayer – Default multimedia player based on Totem
  • Improved Artwork (default theme)

In this article we will walk through “Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon” installation steps along with the screen shots.

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