Samsung NP300V3A-S02NL

Installation of Linux mint LMDE

This notebook is from 2011 and ran Windows 7. The owner reported that the system was unusable slow. After securing the important files I got it to install Linux.

Apparently, the system was in an unusable state, probably the power was switched off without a proper shutdown. Two option where presented:

• F2: setup
• F4: recover

F2 did nothing, but F4 yielded after 15 minutes or so a system that more or less worked. And F2 was working: pressing F2 after power-on put me in the BIOS setup.

After some lessons learned, I got Linux mint LMDE installed by:

• enabling UEFI in the BIOS
• booting from the Linux mint install USB (lmde-7-cinnamon-64bit.iso)
• run gparted to remove all partitions
• start the installer

The system runs, albeit slow, probably caused by a slow disk. It is using a proprietary NVIDIA driver, taken care of by the installer.

The system has only 4 Gbyte of memory, so it seemed a good idea to use xfce in stead of cinnamon as desktop environment. However, since xfce lacks some handy graphical tools (for example a package manager), I decided to use cinnamon.