For example, the language you want Mint to use and your time zone. You'll need to walk your way through several menu choices. Read also: The most popular Linux desktop programs are. Double-click it and you'll be on your way. Once you have the Mint display up, one of your icon choices on the left will be to install Mint. The last thing you want is to run out of battery power during an operating system install! You'll also need an internet connection and about 8GBs of free drive space. All involve going to the UEFI control panel during the boot process and switching it off. There are many ways to switch Secure Boot off. If for some reason you can't install Mint with Secure Boot running on your PC, you can always turn off Secure Boot. All pre-built binaries intended to be loaded as part of the boot process, with the exception of the initrd image, are signed by Canonical's UEFI certificate, which is implicitly trusted by being embedded in the Microsoft signed shim loader. It can still be an annoyance, but Ubuntu and Mint have made booting and installing with Secure Boot system a non-issue. It used to be that installing Linux on Windows PCs with UEFI and Secure Boot was a major pain. Read also: What's the most popular Linux of them all? Once you get to the BIOS or UEFI, look for a menu choice labeled 'Boot,' 'Boot Options,' or 'Boot Order.' If you don't see anything with the word 'boot' in it, check other menu options such as 'Advanced Options,' 'Advanced BIOS Features,' or 'Other Options.' Once you find it, set the boot order so that instead of booting from the hard drive first, you boot from either the CD/DVD drive or from a USB drive.

Read more: Six Clicks: Linux Mint tips and tricks If you don't spot it the first time, don't worry about it. Likely candidates are a function key or the 'esc' or 'delete' keys. Look for a message as the machine starts up that tells which key or keys you'll need to press in order to get to the BIOS or UEFI. How you do this varies according to the system. During the reboot, stop the boot-up process and get to your PC's UEFI or BIOS settings. Next, you place your disc or USB stick into your PC and reboot.

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