How to Replace Windows XP with Linux for Free. XP user, I am talking to you. In April 2. 01. 4, your favorite operating system stopped being officially supported by Microsoft. Now, theres no reason for panic, but this is a good opportunity to start considering alternatives. Without going into too many details, the free and exciting option is to try Linux. How To Install Pc Linux Os Full Monty Live Usb' title='How To Install Pc Linux Os Full Monty Live Usb' />Chinese manufacturer DJI has announced that owners of its Spark drone have until September 1st to update their firmware to the latest version or be totally locked out. This year has been a big one for me when it comes to international travel, and so last December I decided to bite the bullet on getting a Global Entry account to use. Cold and inclement weather can ruin your day if youre caught unprepared. No one likes dealing with sporadic showers without an umbrella, or cold weather without a. Its important to realize you can try mint or many other distros using a live USB or DVD before committing to a full install. This gives you the opportunity to see. InformationWeek. com News, analysis and research for business technology professionals, plus peertopeer knowledge sharing. Engage with our community. Indeed today we will demonstrate how to dual boot an existing Windows XP installation with the latest edition of Linux Mint, a highly popular Linux distribution, while retaining all the important user data you have. Naturally, this is somewhat of an advanced topic, so you might need to invest a little time reading, but overall, the exercise should be worth the effort. In the end, you will have a fully functional dual boot setup for all your needs, with XP on one end and a modern, stylish Linux Mint 1. Qiana on the other. Lets rock. Preliminary checklist. Installing a new operating system on hardware that already hosts other systems as well as your critical data is not a trivial thing, and should not be treated that way. True, you can just click around and pray for the best. But we want to do this with elegance and confidence. To wit, you should invest some time making sure you have all the tools to make the dual boot transition painless and fool proof. Data backup imaging. If your data is safe, then everything else becomes secondary. You should make sure that you have a copy of your files somewhere, preferably on a separate hard disk, or even a separate machine. Win Butler here. Furthermore, you might want to image the Windows XP installation, so if something goes wrong, you can easily revert. I highly recommend you do not do anything unless you have a verifiable copy of your personal stuff backed up in another location. Understanding of basic Linux concepts and tools. I am going to do a small amount of extra linking here, so I apologize in advance. But reading these articles will help you master the subject matter, and help you understand this tutorial. For starters, you might want to check my older dual boot guides, including XP Ubuntu tutorial, Windows 7 Ubuntu tutorial and the latest Windows 8 Ubuntu article. Then, to understand disk notation and partitioning, please take a look at my GParted guide. Last but not the least, the bootloader section. Windows XP overview. Now that we know what we want and need, lets take a look at our Windows XP installation. So we have a a system with two hard disks. The C drive is located on the 1. GB first disk, and it spans the entire size of the disk, i. The E drive contains data, and it is located on the 2. GB second disk. Once again, it spans the entire disk, i. Our system is not really designed for any dual booting. This means we will have to adjust the layout to be able to install and use Linux Mint. Therefore, what we are going to do is the following We will boot into the Mint live session. This can be done from the ISO image, a DVD drive or a USB drive. The exact steps will depend on your setup. Now, if you are not really sure where to obtain the Linux Mint image, how to download it or copyburn it to external media, and how to make your system boot another operating system, then you should stop right now, go back up, do your necessary reading, and resume when youre ready and knowledgeable. All right, but assuming that you are, then we will need to adjust the disk and partition layout. We will not mess with the C drive. We will change the E drive. In other words, we will shrink the one partition that corresponds to the E drive in Windows, and in the freed space, we will create several new partitions that will be used as the target for the Linux Mint 1. Qiana installation. We will do all this from the live Mint session, using tools already available in the distribution. Now, lets boot into Linux. Linux Mint overview. There are two sides to the Linux exploration coin. One is getting familiar with a completely new user interface, new phrases, new terminology, and a new mode of work. However, this is true for pretty much any operating system, and therefore, we wont spend too much time on this. Instead, we will focus on the more critical part of making the right disk and partition changes and installing Linux Mint. After that, the fun of discovering the beauty and flexibility of this new operating system will be your home work. Partitioning. We will begin by changing the disk layout. To that end, launch the GParted partition editor. The software is available in the system menu, and you can search for it by name. Once launched, the program will display the existing layouts for all available disks. In our case, we have two disks. The first one is what we refer to as the C drive in Windows, and it is labeled sda here. The second one corresponds to the E drive, and it is labeled sdb. We will edit the latter. Resize partition. Lets begin with the resizing. Right click on the devsdb. ResizeMove. Then, adjust the size to a smaller value. We will go down from 2. GB to just 4. GB, but any size goes. Do note that Linux Mint requires at least 8. GB to install successfully. However, there are some additional consideration here. A proper Linux installation includes a minimum of three partitions. The root partition contains system files. The swap partition is used for memory swapping, a la virtual memory page file in Windows. You might want to make it the size of your physical RAM. This means something like 2 3. GB for most systems running Windows XP 3. But if you have more, thats fine too. Lastly, theres the user data, known as home home partition. This one does not have to exist, and you can just go with the root partition. But it is very convenient to have it, for the same reason you want those extra drives for your data in Windows. In case you need to reinstall or change things, you do not have to lose your user setup. And its much easier to back stuff up and restore later. Therefore, going down to 4. GB sounds prudent. This means we can create a 1. GB root, a 2. GB swap, and the remainder will be used for the home partition. Furthermore, the NTFS partition corresponding to the E drive will also be available in Linux Mint, since most distributions can natively mount, read and write Windows partitions. So you do not really lose anything, and theres a lot of place to grow and store data, if needed. The changes will not be committed until you hit Apply, so you need not worry if you do not like your setup. You can always start from scratch. At the moment, we have a single resize operation pending. We will now add a few more tasks to the list. We need to create additional partitions. Create new partitions. Remember the earlier three partition suggestion We can do that right away. The thing is, you should consider creating an Extended partition first, so you do not hit the limit of four primary partitions for the MS DOS type partition table. No such limit exists with GPT, but Windows XP does not support that type, and the conversion procedure is destructive. Therefore, MS DOS partition table is our only option, so we will create the Extended partition to span the entire free space, the new 1. GB we reclaimed just above, and in that space, we will create the root, swap and home partitions. When creating the partitions, you will need to pay attention to a few small but important details. Size, of course. Partition type the Extended partition is in fact a primary partition of a special kind, and it can only contain logical partitions inside it, therefore our three Linux partitions will all be logical. This is not a problem because Linux distributions do not have any problem being installed or booting from either primary or logical partitions. On a side note, Windows XP must be installed to a primary partition. The last item of importance is the filesystem type. I recommend you use a native Linux format, one of the journaling filesystems. The best choice is to use EXT4, although you can try others. Make Your Global Entry Appointment Come Months Faster By Walking In. This year has been a big one for me when it comes to international travel, and so last December I decided to bite the bullet on getting a Global Entry account to use throughout the year. When I got approved for the service, however, I ran into one big snafu the soonest appointment I could get for my in person interview was eight months away, long after a few international trips I had planned. If youre somehow not familiar with Global Entry, its a program where you submit to a background check and in person interview with U. S. Customs and Border Protection once at your home airport, and then for 1. TSA Pre when youre flying domestically. Its a service I recommend everyone who travels, even a little bit, to get. Earlier this year when I got back from Italy, for instance, I was through customs in San Francisco a full hour and half before my boyfriend was thanks to Global Entry. I walked through the same lines as flight crew at SFO, waited in zero lines, and was sipping on coffee at Starbucks outside of security roughly 2. If you can save yourself that customs headache a few times over the five year span, and use TSA Pre a few times, that 1. The first step in applying for Global Entry is filling out an online form for your background check, which is pretty easy and you can really do anytime. That in person interview, which you set up after youre preliminarily approved, can be a huge hassle though, depending on where you live. Rather than wait for months and months to get an appointment, you should just do a walk in instead. I oddly learned about walk ins from the Yelp page for SFOs Global Entry office. Heres how to make it happen Every Global Entry office takes a few walk in appointments each day. All the advice I read suggested getting to the office a few hours before they opened like 4am arrival early. Both my boyfriend and I however, opted to arrive before lunch instead. I arrived around 1. When you arrive, tell the person at the door youre there as a walk in for a Global Entry appointment. Theyll have you write your name down on a paper, and tell you youre not guaranteed to be seen that day, but that theyll try to work you in. Bring something to occupy yourself for a few hours. I have the luxury of working form home, so I packed my laptop and a lunch. This will probably happen fast, but come with the idea youre going to camp out for a while. I was called for an appointment within 2 minutes of putting my name of the signup sheet. My boyfriend, who did this months later, was called within 1. From what I can tell and from my own experience appointments take roughly 5 minutes, but are scheduled for 1. Theres a really solid chance theyll find room for you soon. I had a TSA Pre number before I left the Global Entry office which I used for a flight that same week, and I got an email saying my Global Entry account was active before I even made it home from my appointment. Of course, milage may vary for this. If you have a flight, especially an International one however, it can pay to just head to the airport an hour or two early for your flight and give walking in a try. Another tip that appointment can also happen at any office in the country. If your home airport is as backed up as mine at SFO, you can schedule your appointment somewhere else instead. Before I did my walk in, I had scheduled mine for Vegas, where I was traveling in April. That was a full four months sooner than I was able to get at home.