Linux for the rest of us...(Some shortcuts for you)

I have been dabbling with Linux as an alternative to Microsoft Windows for quite some time.

Especially with the advent of Windows 8 I no longer wanted to stay on the Windows tread mill.

So recently I purchased a new laptop and decided to go Linux.

In case anyone else should find this interesting I'll share my experience in the hope that my limited knowledge in this are can help other people taking the same path.

I bought a manufacturer refurbished Asus X53 (i7 processor) from Morgan Computer Company.

I removed the rather small hard drive (which had Windows installed) once I had established that the machine worked. I replaced the drive with a Toshiba 750Gbyte unit that was on special offer at PC World.

I had previously created a Linux Mint boot DVD (Nadia version) and so put it into the DVD tray and booted up.

This is what is known as a LIVE disc as all the information is on the DVD and it does not require a hard drive. I made sure that I had the WiFi working so that the laptop could connect to the Internet.

Next I used the option to install the operating system onto the hard drive. Since I had a brand new hard drive I let the installer program use the whole disc but there are other options possible.

After several minutes, a power up, power down sequence and some downloads to update the release I had a brand new install. Great!

The standard install provides application software that can read CD/DVDs, a media player,  LibreOffice for spreadsheets/wordprocessing etc and Gimp for image processing.

Adding more software is mostly painless and of course since it open source it is also cost free. I'll talk about packages I use in another post.

Problems? It's taken a couple of different programs to be able to fully use the built in web cam and the SD card reader does not really work. Apart from that all good and I;m pretty sure the web cam thing is sorted.

So now I can record new audio and video programs for hypnotherapy and other self change work on my laptop. That's great for me.

Goodbye Windows....for good.