The advantage of dual boot is that you can have multiple operating systems on one computer and if one fails you can always start second system and save your data. Since I already have Windows 7 installed on this computer (VirtualBox) my second system will be Linux Mint 17.1 Xfce. The first step is to create a partition for Linux.

1. Open the Start Menu and type “DISKMGMT.MSC” and press enter.

2. Right click on (C:) partition and select “Shrink Volume…”

3. Enter the size of the new partition and press “Shrink”. 30 GB (30000 mb) of free space will be enough for Linux but you can make the larger partition if you want.

Partition is created.

4. Restart your computer and press Del or F2 or F12 (depend on your computer’s mainboard) to enter the system BIOS and chose BOOT FROM CD/DVD, save the configuration and exit BIOS.
5. Insert Linux Mint 17.1 into your DVD drive.

6. Press enter key on “Start Linux Mint”.

7. Double click “Install Linux Mint” icon.

8. Choose installation language and press “Continue”.

9. Click “Continue”.

10. Select “Something else” and press “Continue”.

11. Mark “free space 31458 mb” and press “+” in down left corner to create Linux partition’s.

12. Create a swap partition of 4 GB shown in the image above and press “OK”.

13. Press “+” in down left corner and create file system partition shown in the image above and press “OK”.

14. Press “Install Now”.

15. Press “Continue”.

16. Choose your location and press “Continue”.

17. Choose your keyboard layout and press “Continue”.

18. Fill out the required fields and press “Continue”

19. Wait a few minutes until the installation is complete.

20. Press “Restart Now” button and remove Linux Mint installation disc from DVD rom.

21. When you reboot you will see a menu where you can choose to start Linux (first option) or Windows (fifth option). Choose the first option and press enter.
The next step is to upgrade the system.

22. Open Menu, type “update” and press enter.

23. Click “Install Updates”.

24. Enter your password and press “Authenticate”

25. Update Manager will automatically download the package files and install it.

Congratulations, you have successfully installed Linux Mint on your computer

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1. Open Mint menu, type “driver” and press enter.

2. Type your password and click “OK”.

3. Select the driver and click Apply.

It would then download the necessary packages for the selected driver, install it and configure it.

If you have ATI graphics card then will ATI driver appear in Driver Manager.

Restart your PC.

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Removing unnecessary system service can help you to gain faster booting time.

1. Open Mint menu, type “startup” and press Enter.

2. Click “Application Autostart” and disable services you don’t need.

 Decrease the swap use

This is especially noticeable on computers with relatively low RAM memory (1 GB or less): they tend to be far too slow in Linux Mint, and Linux Mint accesses the hard disk too much. Luckily, this can be helped.

On the hard disk there’s a separate partition for virtual memory, called the swap. When Mint uses the swap too much, the computer slows down a lot. Mint’s inclination to use the swap, is determined by a setting. The lower the setting number, the longer it takes before Mint starts using the swap. On a scale of 0-100, the default setting is 60. Which is much too high for normal desktop use, and only fit for servers.

– Check your current swappiness setting:

Menu – Accessories – Terminal

Type (use copy/paste to avoid errors):
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

Press Enter.

The result will probably be 60.

– Make sure that you have installed the applications gksu and leafpad:

Menu – Accessories – Terminal

Type (use copy/paste to transport this magical incantation to the terminal):
sudo apt-get install gksu leafpad

Press Enter. When prompted, type your password. Your password will remain entirely invisible, not even dots will show, this is normal. Press Enter again.

– To change the swappiness into a more sensible setting, type in the terminal (use copy/paste):
gksudo leafpad /etc/sysctl.conf

Press Enter.

Scroll to the bottom of the text file and add your swappiness parameter to override the default. Copy/paste the following bold lines:

# Decrease swap usage to a more reasonable level
vm.swappiness=10

– Save and close the text file. Then reboot your computer.

Note: your machine might benefit from an even bigger decrease in swappiness. A useful rule of thumb might be this:
1 GB RAM or more: set swappiness to 10
Less than 1 GB RAM: set swappiness to 5

Preload

Preload learns how applications behave and loads them into memory so the applications will launch quickly on next time.You can install the software with following command in terminal:

sudo apt-get install preload

Press Enter.

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1. Open Mint menu, type “software manager” and press enter.

2. Type your password and press “OK” button.

3. Open categories. For example “Featured”

4. Double click on app you want to install

5. Click “Install” button

Linux Mint/Ubuntu recommended apps

GParted uses libparted to detect and manipulate devices and partition tables while several (optional) filesystem tools provide support for filesystems not included in libparted.

VLC is the VideoLAN project’s media player. It plays MPEG, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, MOV, WMV, QuickTime, WebM, FLAC, MP3, Ogg/Vorbis files, DVDs, VCDs, podcasts, and multimedia streams from various network sources.

Opera is a small, fast, customizable, powerful and user-friendly web browser, as well as an Internet suite, including an email client, an IRC client, and web developer tools (Opera Dragonfly).

Firefox delivers safe, easy web browsing. A familiar user interface, enhanced security features including protection from online identity theft, and integrated search let you get the most out of the web.

Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on Linux. Applications are run at full speed without the need of cpu emulation. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, however it can use native system dll files in place of its own if they are available.

GIMP is an advanced picture editor. You can use it to edit, enhance, and retouch photos and scans, create drawings, and make your own images. It has a large collection of professional-level editing tools and filters, similar to the ones you might find in Photoshop. Numerous fine-control settings and features like layers, paths, masks, and scripting give you total control over your images.

Thunderbird is a full-featured email, RSS and newsgroup client that makes emailing safer, faster and easier than ever before. It supports different mail accounts (POP, IMAP, Gmail), has a simple mail account setup wizard, one- click address book, tabbed interface, an integrated learning spam filter, advanced search and indexing capabilities, and offers easy organization of mails with tagging and virtual folders. It also features unrivalled extensibility.

Skype is software that enables the world’s conversations. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype to make free video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files with other Skype users. Every day, people also use Skype to make low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles.

K3b provides a comfortable user interface to perform most CD/DVD burning tasks. While the experienced user can take influence in all steps of the burning process the beginner may find comfort in the automatic settings and the reasonable k3b defaults which allow a quick start.

Deluge is a full-featured, multi-platform, multi-interface BitTorrent client using libtorrent-rasterbar in its back end and featuring multiple user-interfaces: GTK+, web and console.

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily.

Shutter is a feature-rich screenshot program. You can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website – apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window.

LibreOffice is a full-featured office productivity suite that provides a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft(R) Office.

Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.

VirtualBox – Run other operating system within virtual machines. This package points to the latest version of Virtualbox from Oracle and includes USB support and shared folders.

Banshee is a media management and playback application for the GNOME desktop, allowing users to import audio from CDs, search their library, create playlists of selections of their library, sync music to/from iPods and other media devices, play and manage video files and burn selections to a CD.

BleachBit deletes unnecessary files to free valuable disk space, maintain privacy, and remove junk. It removes cache, Internet history, temporary files, cookies, and broken shortcuts. It handles cleaning of Adobe Reader, Bash, Beagle, Epiphany, Firefox, Flash, GIMP, Google Earth, Java, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Opera, RealPlayer, rpmbuild, Second Life Viewer, VIM, XChat, and more.

Docky – A full fledged dock application that makes opening common applications and managing windows easier and quicker. Docky is fully integrated into the GNOME Desktop and features a no nonsense approach to configuration and usage. It just works.

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