Difference between revisions of "Mint Linux Bootable Installation Media"

Revision as of 11:47, 11 February 2022

You can find out how to download Linux Mint:

• https://linuxmint.com/download.php

Download

It is recommended to use the bittorrent download option for best speed and efficiency.

Verify

Once downloaded, verify your new ISO image file using checksum.

Anyone can produce fake ISO images, it is your responsibility to check you are downloading the official ones.

Download the ISO image then click on the sha256sum.txt and sha256sum.txt.gpg buttons from the Mint web site to see the key hash you can compare to.

Or you can save the SHA256 sums provided by Linux Mint locally.

Here is how I did it. After downloading the iso, and for this example we will consider linuxmint-20.3-cinnamon-64bit.iso, I used the program GtkHash.

Then from the web site I compared to the correct hash from

e739317677c2261ae746eee5f1f0662aa319ad0eff260d4eb7055d7c79d10952 *linuxmint-20.3-cinnamon-64bit.iso

Burn

While in the past we used bootable CD ROM discs, then maybe DVD as the ISO files began to bloat, the preferred method is currently the use of bootable solid state media.

There are a number of Bootable USB flash drive utilities you can use.

For this example we will simply use The dd Command in Linux.

When you insert the USB flash drive into the Linux PC it is immediately recognized as a block device. It will be auto mounted if there is a partition that has a compatible file system. If it is auto mounted you need to unmount it from the command line while not "ejecting" it. We want the kernel to see the block device, however, we do not want any partition mounted.

1. insert the USB stick
2. unmount the USB stick media if mounted
3. write the ISO image to the boot media USB stick

The block device will show up in fdisk -l and if it does not, then you will not be able to write the ISO to the flash drive. To find the correct drive

sudo fdisk -1

I found mine, it looked like this:

Disk /dev/sdc: 15.1 GiB, 16231956480 bytes, 31703040 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xc3072e18

Verify it is the correct one

sudo mount |grep sdc

Yours probably wont be sdc. It could be though. I found mine because I knew the size of it, and the disk label from what I previously used it for. For the example instructions we shall continue with sdc, substitute your mount and be careful so you don't wipe out an important drive on your own system (make sure you have the correct one, do not assume sdc.)

If the flash drive auto mounts (mine did,) then simply unmount it by a command

sudo mount |grep sdc
/dev/sdc1 on /media/nicolep/UUI type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,showexec,utf8,flush,errors=remount-ro,uhelper=udisks2)
sudo umount /dev/sdc1
sudo mount |grep sdc

I unmounted it and then double-checked to make sure it was no longer mounted.

With the block device recognized, and the partition(s) not mounted, I found this command to work best:

sudo dd if=./linuxmint-20.3-cinnamon-64bit.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

can detach a USB drive with the following commands

sudo eject /dev/sdc