I may have f'ed up my newly installed Mint?

F

franknstein

Guest
Hey there,

I am brand spanking new to Linux. I installed Mint on my netbook yesterday via flashdrive. Today I tried to install various programs that I regularly use. Google Chrome installed fine, but when I tried to install AVG Free 2014, it crashed my computer after restarting. I was following instructions online from a tutorial so it's possible I typed the wrong command or I downloaded a bad file.

I don't know what to do next as I am a brand new linux user. There is nothing of importance on the netbook so wiping it and starting over is completely doable. I'm asking for any suggestions or advice you guys might have.

Thanks.
 


Usually there is no need for an anti-virus program in Linux because there are very few viruses designed to attack Linux, but that's not a way to approach it. HOWEVER, if you were to use one (and it can't hurt), ClamTK is a good one for Linux. But make sure you have a good firewall built that is durable and solid as this is most important. GUFW is a gui for the ufw firewall in Linux. These are all available in the software center. Hope this helps. Anyone else with suggestions?
 
Ok, thanks. I appreciate the speedy feedback and the advice.

Like I said, I am noob in Linux so I was just doing things that I'd normally do on my windows computer. I'll check out the suggestion for the Linux anti-virus, but I'm still not sure on what I should do about the current state of my netbook.

Whenever, I turn it on, it takes forever to load, and before the home desktop fully loads, it displays a message saying something along the lines of Cinnamon has crashed, you are in fallback mode, do you want to restart? If I restart it just continues in the same loop. If I don't restart it just stalls and never fully loads. All this started occurring after I rebooted after installing AVG.

So, I think I am going to just start over, do a fresh install and hopefully not make the same mistakes. I'm mainly running Mint just to become familiar with Linux and test it out. All my serious work is done on another computer, but thanks for your suggestions and advice.
 
Hi franknstein,
You should try Ubuntu on your netbook because it has user-friendly interface for newbies.Ubuntu 14.04 (SS) is released with browser, office-suite,media players and so on.Moreover, Ubuntu can run on old model hardwares well.Have fun with Linux.
 
What you are going to have to do is either boot with some live cd (I use sysresccd) or into a limited shell session, and first move all the hidden directories in your user home (hidden dirs start with a period char, view them using ls -a) into a temporary holding tank so that they don't get a chance to run during login, and then go into etc (either init.d or possibly rc.d, depending on distro) and do the same with anything that wasn't installed by the distro. Then you can have the fun of slowly adding the various startup scripts back.

Or, you can just reinstall your distro.

The second choice is preferable if you don't want a detailed lesson in linux workings.
 
Mint is a very good distro. I switched from Ubuntu to Mint and Cinnamon for a desktop is awesome. I was using Ubuntu Gnome because I cant stand Unity. That was running OK, but I'm getting a better response from Mint. Just my 2 cents, that's all.
 
franknstein said:
Ok, thanks. I appreciate the speedy feedback and the advice.

Like I said, I am noob in Linux so I was just doing things that I'd normally do on my windows computer. I'll check out the suggestion for the Linux anti-virus, but I'm still not sure on what I should do about the current state of my netbook.

Whenever, I turn it on, it takes forever to load, and before the home desktop fully loads, it displays a message saying something along the lines of Cinnamon has crashed, you are in fallback mode, do you want to restart? If I restart it just continues in the same loop. If I don't restart it just stalls and never fully loads. All this started occurring after I rebooted after installing AVG.

So, I think I am going to just start over, do a fresh install and hopefully not make the same mistakes. I'm mainly running Mint just to become familiar with Linux and test it out. All my serious work is done on another computer, but thanks for your suggestions and advice.
Click to expand...
I believe AVG is keeping parts of Cinnamon from loading. Like everyone else said, on Linux systems, Anti-virus is not needed. Just make sure your firewall is on and setup properly and you will be fine. There are viruses that will infect Linux, I am not denying it, but there are just as many OS X viruses as there are Linux viruses. And for similar reasons. If you don't need anti-virus on Unix systems, you won't need it on Linux. :D
 
Overall, do not treat Linux as you did Windows it is a completely new OS and no "Windows" programs will work with Linux. Some software has Linux versions and for those that don't there are usually free software programs that accomplish the same thing, but do some Google searching on "Getting started with Linux" and "Setting up Linux Mint"
Truthfully there aren't really any software requirements with Linux that exist with Windows (anti-virus) and until you get more familiar with Linux I would stick with only installing software from the Mint repository (probably called the software download center or something like that, haven't used Mint in a while)
 
You can stick to linux mint it is comfortable, works out-of-the-box and have tons of preinstalled applications. But you don't need any virus protection for everyday stuff, that is not necessary
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Members online

Total: 614 (members: 2, guests: 612)

Latest posts

Top