I encountered David Spring on a radio download and downloaded his book. I immediatedly took action before finishing the two hour talk show recording asked a computer guy locally who only wants to work with Windows but was willing to do what David Spring suggested. He cam out dowloaded Mint Mate 15 , split my hard drive on my old 32 bit lattitude xp. That week Mint Mate failed to open and as XP still was workig knew it ws a bad download.

Meanwhile finished audio realizing it should have been Mint Mate 16 had him download that to two of my new Windows 7 Lattitude 3450 and Lattitude 6400 as bought extra 500 gig hard drive's so could keep my warranties until could learn Lenox and leave Windows in the dust!.

Problem is I need to use Webex it works fine with Mint Mate 15 32 bit but not with 64 bit rep explained later. My Epson 845 workforce all in one also will print with mint mate 15 32 bit on old lattitude. My dictaphone is not Lenox friendly. You can see splitting hard drive would solve my problems.


Problem no computer shops locally or anywhere can I find who will help me as loyal to microsoft and once I learn from this wonderful linux nubie site which Mint Mate to bea more compatible with my needed sofware where can i get help step by step to accomplish the task.

This is exciting and I know it is just the beginning to switching worlds to a safer environment for me and I want to help my friends do the same .

Can any one help me please
kat

I think a lot of people will gladly help you. My first suggestion is to stop paying somebody to do this for you as you can learn to do it quite easily yourself (worse case, you can order DVD for $5, but I think you really should learn to do it yourself). I don't think the shops are necessarily "loyal" to microsoft, it's just that is what they do and know.

A few months ago, I installed linux on a xp pc as a dual boot. And, I am not in any way a power user, I just started reading and watching tutorials, seeing forums like this, and to my great surprise I was able to do it myself with no problem.

One thing though: Please don't just say the brand and model of pc: to get the best help you need to include how much ram it has and the processor speed. That will be a big help in determining the best distro for your needs.

Heya welcome to Linux and LQ

I would recommend downloading Mint 17. It has just been released a week ago and will have 5 years of support. Mint 15 is no longer supported and Mint 16's support expires in July. Mint follows Ubuntu's release schedule. This means each 6 months a new version. Normally with 9 months support. But every 2 years they release an LTS (Long Term Support) version. Of which Mint 17 is an example of

Could you list the CPU, amount of RAM etc. So we can figure out which version of Mint 17 would work best on your computer. 32 or 64 bits. Judging from your post it would seem to me that 64 bits Mint works, but you might be better off using the 32-bits if the printer and software you use don't work.

And I agree with jross. I'm no master on Linux myself. But I did learn how to get it running Just as I've learned how to use Windows all those years ago. And trying out several different Linux distributions over the years I've discovered that Linux Mint is very easy to set up and work with.

Just to correct this, with Mint 17 the Mint developers have changed their release model, all future Mint versions will be based on Ubuntu LTS versions, so they should get longer support.

2 members found this post helpful.