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These are my notes on configuring Linux Mint 22.x.

Linux Mint 22.x is based on Ubuntu 24.04. Make sure to read the Ubuntu release notes.

If you find this and think it is useful, leave a comment and say what you like or don’t like. Keep in mind these are my own notes and are not intended to be a HowTo for the general public.

This installation was done on an Dell Optiplex 7050. I’m also installing on Oracle Virtual Box so I will add some additional steps for that which will be noted as extra steps for Virtual Box.

Disable Secure Boot

I attempted to install with Secure Boot enabled, but it seems that Linux Mint has an issue installing certain drivers with secure boot enabled. This is not really something I need so I am disabling Secure Boot in the bios to not be hassled with it.

Install Linux Mint 22.x.

As of this writing it is Mint 22.0. I typically avoid a .0 release, but I just got a new computer and this OS was just released so we’ll see how it goes. I may update these instructions as newer versions come out. Without going into lots of detail on how to install Linux Mint which has been covered in many other HowTos I am just focusing on what I do to configure it to my liking. I am installing on a fresh new disk. I did install multimedia codecs. If you have turned off Secure Boot as mentioned earlier you will not have any additional prompts in this area.

I did select Advanced Features in the Installation Type window and selected to use LVM with the new installation. I did choose to erase disk because this is a new disk and a fresh install. I did choose to encrypt my home directory. I did encrypt home directory.

The installation is pretty straight forward and not complicated.

Up and Running

Virtual Box Guest Additions

As I mentioned I am also installing Linux Mint 22 on a Virtual machine so for Virtual Box Virtual Machine you will need to install Guest Additions. Ignore this if you are doing on a physical machine.

1. Click Devices
2. Insert Guest Additions CD image
3. Click ‘Run’
4. Type your password

This will install guest additions and allow you to resize your screen on the fly.

First Steps

When you first Launch Linux Mint you will get a Welcome Screen. On the left click ‘First Steps’.

Desktop Colors: I kept the default
Update Manager: Launch the Update Manager and update everything.
Driver Manager: When I launch I get a message that no drivers are needed.
System Snapshots: I will address at a later time.
Firewall: Also addressed later.

Firmware

I want to make sure my firmware (bios and other firmware) are up to date. Do that by doing the following:

$ sudo apt install fwupd
$ fwupdmgr get-updates
$ fwupdmgr update

Then follow the prompts to update. The system will reboot and do the updates then reboot again.

Sudoers

Edit the /etc/sudoers file so you don’t have to put your password in each time:

$ sudo visudo

There will be a line that looks like this:

%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

Comment out that line and make it look like this:

%sudo ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

Now when you use sudo you will not have to enter your password.

Install OpenSSH Server

Install SSH Server so you can ssh to the host:

$ sudo apt install openssh-server -y

Test ssh to the new host. You may during this process encounter an error regarding an “Offending ECDSA key in ~/.ssh/known_hosts”. This is easily resolved by deleting the referenced line in ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

I’ve also experienced an issue where when attempting to ssh to this new host via name it does not work. SSH via IP address does work. DNS resolution is correct. I even have the host in /etc/hosts. No dice.

I was finally able to resolve the issue by putting an entry into the ssh config file on my SSH from host in the ~/.ssh/config.d/LocalHosts.conf file. The entry in this file looks like this:

Host pop
  Hostname 192.168.20.34
  ForwardX11 yes
  ForwardX11Trusted yes

This seems to have solved the problem. I suspect I have some other conflicting entry in my ssh config files that are preventing this, but I can’t find it.

SSH Keys:

Now that you can ssh to your new host you will want to be able to ssh using your ssh key instead of password. From the remote host do this:

$ ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub [newhostname]

You will be prompted to enter the password for the New Host. It will copy over your public ssh key from ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. This assumes your public ssh key is indeed ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

You should be able to ssh to the new host now without entering your password.

(Optional) Now copy all the ~/.ssh directory contents from your old host into this new host so you have the keys, the known hosts and authorized keys files from your user on the old host and now have them on your new host.

From the old host:

$ cd ~/.ssh
$ scp -r * [new-host-name]:~/.ssh

Hosts file:

Copy the Home Network section of your /etc/hosts file from the old host to the /etc/hosts file on the new host.

pCloud

Instead of
Dropbox I’ve decided to try pCloud. It is half as much money and much easier to set up. Pretty much all you have to do is create an account on pCloud then download the software binary and run it. It will install and run every time you boot your computer. Put the binary in /usr/bin, then after you run it, check Startup Applications to make sure it is starting each time and from correct path. Test by rebooting to see if it starts automatically.

I got the basic account which gives me 500 GB of storage which is more than I need. So far this has worked very well for me and is much less problematic than DropBox. I’ve not tried on MacOS or Windows yet but usually Linux is where most of the problems come from.

Install KeepassXC

Keepass XC is the greatest Password Safe in my humble opinion.

Install it:

$ sudo apt install keepassxc -y

Install Chrome

You’ll need Chrome as well

Go to https://www.google.com/chrome/

Click the Download Chrome button. Mine automatically downloaded into ~/Downloads. The 64 bit version was automatically selected.

Install it like this:

$ cd ~/Downloads
$ sudo apt install ./google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

This will automatically install a repository as well for future updates.

Install Signal

Create a temporary directory off of your home directory:

$ mkdir -p ~/tmp
$ cd ~/tmp

Install the Signal official public software signing key:

$ wget -O- https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc | gpg --dearmor > signal-desktop-keyring.gpg
$ cat signal-desktop-keyring.gpg | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg > /dev/null

Add the Signal repository to your list of repositories:

$ echo 'deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg] https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt xenial main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list

Note that noble is the Ubuntu version that corresponds to Mint 22, but they don’t have a repo for noble so you need to use the xenial repo as shown above.

Update your package database and install Signal:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install signal-desktop

Now from the start menu, find signal and run it. You will be prompted to scan a QR code from your signal app on your phone. Go to three dots > Settings > Linked Devices and scan the QR Code.

Now edit the startup line in /usr/share/applications/signal-desktop.desktop to look like this:

Exec=/opt/Signal/signal-desktop --use-tray-icon --no-sandbox %U

This will keep Signal alive in your system tray when you close it.

You will also want to add signal to the automatic startup list. [Super Key] > Startup Applications. Click the ‘+’ sign and ‘Choose Application‘, find Signal, select it the click ‘Add Application’. You can also edit the config to have a start delay to give the PC some time to settle before starting it. I delayed it for 120 seconds.

Additional Software

There are other software packages I commonly use that need to be installed:

$ sudo apt install  kwrite kate terminator sshuttle vim sshpass nfs-common gparted imagemagick whois lsscsi -y

Mount NFS Share

Mount the NFS share of your old workstation or other server. Create a mount point:

$ mkdir -p /mnt/[nfs-host-name]
$ mkdir -p /mnt/nfs-pop

Make sure the NFS server is in your /etc/hosts file by name.

Test mount the remote NFS Server at your newly created mount point:

$ sudo mount [nfs-server]:/home/mac/mnt/nvme /mnt/[mount-point]
$ sudo mount pop:/home/mac/mnt/nvme /mnt/nfs_pop

Edit the /etc/fstab file to create an entry in it:

# External Mount
pop:/home/mac/mnt/nvme /mnt/nfs_pop nfs rw,soft,noauto 0 0

Now you can simply mount or un-mount the NFS server with the following commands:

$ sudo mount /mnt/nfs_pop
$ sudo umount /mnt/nfs_pop

There may be firewall rules in play that you will have to set or open.

Crossover

Get the most recent version of Crossover here:
https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover

Get the free trial and download to your machine.

Then install like this:

$ sudo apt install ./crossover_[version-number].deb

Before you attempt to run any bottle you will need to install this library:

$ sudo apt-get install liblcms2-2:i386

This will install a bunch of other dependencies as well.

Register the installation of CrossOver before you attempt to install anything.

To export a bottle from one machine to another, in this case Quicken, which is the only reason for running Crossover, do this:

1. Open Crossover
2. Right Click on the Quicken_Classic Bottle.
3. Choose ‘Export Quicken_Classic to Archive’
4. Choose a location to save it. It is a good idea to time stamp the file to not overwrite a previous working bottle export.
5. On the new machine go to Menu > Bottle > Import Bottle Archive
6. Browse to where you stored the archive, click it and click ‘Restore’.
7. I get a message that CrossOver needs to install several Linux packages in order to run Windows applications. Click Yes. This will install a butt load of libraries and dependencies.
8. You may actually think it is stuck but when it seems to stop doing something see if the ‘Continue’ button is active and if so, click it.
9. The process will sit there for a bit acting like it is stuck. I let is sit for a few minutes then came back and x’ed out of where it was. Closed Crossover and started it again. It seems to have installed the bottle.
10. Finally your bottle should be imported.
11. Make your symlinks to your datafiles to your home directory because Crossover has issues with finding files that are deep.
12. Crossover only needs your email address and login password to register. There is no serial number.

Surprisingly this was the first time importing a bottle worked flawlessly. This is a new version on new machine so maybe they worked the kinks out of it.

VueScan

Get the latest version here:
https://www.hamrick.com/alternate-versions.html

Install it and put you serial number and registration number in.

Profile

Modify your profile.

Edit ~/.bashrc and change

alias ll='ls -alF'

to

alias ll='ls -lF'

Set your $PATH to include ~/bin

# Set your path to inclue $HOME/bin
PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"

Save the file and then source it like this:

$ source ~/.bashrc

Additional Packages

Here’s a way you can see what packages you have on your old machine and compare to what you have on your new machine.

On the old machine do:

$ sudo apt list --installed | cut -f1 -d/ | sort > installed.[old-hostname]

Then on the new machine do:

$ sudo apt list --installed | cut -f1 -d/ | sort > installed.[new-hostname]

Then SCP the installed.[new-hostname] file to the old host and then compare them like this:

$ diff installed.gob installed.pop | grep ‘<‘

This will give you a list of packages that are installed on the old host but not on the new host. It turns out I had quite a few. Go thru the list and see what you need on the new.

The majority of the packages you find will probably be dependencies for some other package you installed. If you don’t know what a package is for you can easily check information about it with:

$ apt show [package-name]

The majority of the packages I found this way are libraries that are dependencies for other packages I have installed over time.

I found a few packages that I think are useful and should probably be installed:

$ sudo apt install gimp git nmap nmap-common traceroute ethtool ffmpeg guake steam sysstat

Install Spotify

Want to play your Spotify play lists? Install Spotify from the Software Manager. Just search for it and install it.

You should now be able to log into Spotify and play your music.

Mount Additional Drives

See this post Logical Volume on Nvme disk

Install Virtual Box

See this post to install Install VirtualBox 7.0 on Linux Mint 21.x or Linux Mint 22.x