MINT will give you out of the box everything you need except POSSIBLY the best video drivers and the wifi drivers. Because these are 'non free' but once the machine is up preferably on the internet via a CAT5 cable, you can launch the 'drivers' program that searches the hardware and tells you what else you need. As long as you have an internet connection it will then update itself to the suggestions if you click OK
I checked and it runs whatsapp web in firefox OK
The beauty of taking the existing drive out and making it a USB drive is that you can copy data off it and even put it back in if all else goes wrong.
TBH the default installation covers 99% of what you will probably need. I install a few more multimedias apps and a few more desktop publishing apps on the desktop, but the laptop is pure vanilla 19.3 mint these days plus only VLC
As you have seen, lots of people recommend Mint. I use Slackware myself, but that's not suitable for everybody; although sometimes Debian if it's not a machine I need to micromanage.
I am not familiar with Mint, but for a low powered laptop, the choice of window manager can be important. I tend to recommend xfce as one that will seem friendly enough but will not overtax your system, as e.g. kde or gnome might.
Buy pen drive (or external USB DVD drive - whatever)
Download linux image and put onto pen drive (Or DVD)
Change bios boot order and try booting from pen drive(or DVD) Note at this point you haven't changed anything on the computers normal settings or hardware.If booting successful then...
Take a screwdriver to the lenovo, remove hard drive and put that in the external hdd holder.
Put the SSD in the lenovo
plug lenovo into network with cable
Boot and install linux on the SSD.
Run the package update software to get everything as new as can be
Use the drivers part of the control panel to get wifi and or video working to best performance.
plug in the old disk and recover off it anything you need.
The machine boots up from a USB stick (pen drive). The SSD is empty as it has just been swappped intohte HDDs location. The Linux Mint image is on the UB stick.
So, just copy the image over from the USB stick drive onto the SSD?
No. When you boot Mint it actually boots a full blown linux that runs from RAM and the boot media.
It has a preconfigured menu that allows you to either play with linux, use it to do system hardware checks etc or install itself. You just click on that option, tell it to use the whole disk, who you are, where you are and it does everything else automagically.
Once installed it will allow you to do updates to latest patches and so on.
I am up and running on only a USB which is infinitely faster than Windows 10.o change some things. Probably never did it right as some BIOS windows came up on boot up. All works irrespective, sound, graphics, WiFi, cable Internet, etc. Very surprised. I had to go intro the BIOS tI am a happy bunny. :) What it will be like on a SSD I await will eager anticipation. So some more setting up to do.
Can a normal Unix window using standard Unix commands be found?
Lucky you. My dual boot laptop is now borked as a result of 1909.
1) Booted into grub repair but nothing I could do work
2) Used Win10 media USB and got MBR repaired, booted into Windows but no option for Linux
3) Tried Boot-repair and something ran that I didn't expect and I've now lost my Linux partition (unallocated).
Fortunately I'm now having to curtail all my social and external activities so have lots of time to sort it all out.
Please Mr m$oft - when you are going to do an update as I switch off to go to bed tell me what your are going to wreck first. No wonder so many resist any updates and my most reliable system remains this XP that I'm now typing on - a Lenovo 3000-N100 if anyone wants to know, purchased 01/10/2007
Seems like an overly complex way of doing it. How large is the current HDD? More to the point, how much space is actually being used on it?
I would normally just suggest that you clone the existing HDD onto the SSD, then replace the HDD with the SSD. But after that you won't need it. (you can keep it as a disaster recovery backup). (you can use a simple USB to SATA adaptor to plug the new drive into the computer on a short term basis to facilitate the copy - it does not need a complete external caddy as such.
However if you are planning to replace windows entirely with a linux, then just swap the drives, and boot the laptop from a USB thumb drive with your chosen version of linux on it, and do a fresh install.
Usually - although it would be worth doing a search the model number to see if others have had drivers issues. Most stuff works, but you can sometimes get problems with things like laptop track pads.
Pick one of the well known ones, and you will have a better selection of users to ask questions of. People here like mint, but loads of people use Ubunto - however that might be a bit to big and heavy for a lower spec machine. Lots of non geeks use Debian since its basically what the Raspberry pi runs.
As an experiment, download a copy of this and make a USB drive from it:
formatting link
That will give a remarkably responsive desktop on low end hardware with no installation required. (and its not just a "live" style setup that throws everything away on reboot - it persists all settings and data between uses. (its BSD based rather than Linux, but many Linux software packages will install and run just fine)
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