Chapter One · Linux System Administration 2026
Unfound Exits
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Chapter One · Linux System Administration, 2026<br>Where There’s Life, There’s Hope
Tom Adelstein<br>Jul 09, 2026
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Somewhere in your home or office sits a computer that still works and nobody wants. It turns on. It runs. For years, it did its job without complaint. Then one morning, Microsoft called it dead — too old for Windows 11 — and cut it off from the security updates that keep it safe. End of life, they call it.<br>The machine never got the message. You can still boot it in seconds. Nothing inside it broke. Microsoft condemned it — with a date, not a defect.<br>Thanks for reading Unfound Exits! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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Hope lives in that title. The computer everyone wrote off has years of good life left, and you’ll hand it back. By the end of these pages, the machine they buried will run Linux — current, protected, quiet, and yours. You need no special skill. You need the machine, a USB drive, and about an hour.<br>Do it once, and you’ll see the ground the rest of this book stands on: bring one machine back, and you can bring back a roomful, an office, a whole company. Everything starts with the first machine.
The plan, in one breath
Let me lay out the whole thing before we start, so nothing ambushes you ahead.<br>Right now, the machine runs Windows. You’ll replace Windows with Linux Mint — a free operating system that looks and behaves much like the Windows you already know, runs light on older hardware, and never expires on someone else’s calendar. To do it, you’ll copy the Mint installer onto a USB drive, tell the computer to start from that drive instead of from Windows, and let it install Mint on the machine.<br>Simple on paper. The catch: Windows doesn’t leave quietly. Microsoft built a handful of locks into these machines to stop anything but Windows from starting, and most of this chapter walks you past those locks, one at a time. None of them will hold you once you spot it. You’ll meet each one. You’ll get past each one.
Make the USB drive
Put two things on the table: the computer you’re rescuing, and a USB drive — 8 gigabytes or larger, with nothing on it you want to keep, because this erases it.<br>First, the installer. On any working computer, go to linuxmint.com and download Linux Mint. The site offers a few editions — take Cinnamon , the standard one; if the machine drags with age, take Xfce , which rides lighter. Either way, you get one large file, an ISO — picture the whole operating system boxed up in a single download.<br>Now you turn that file into a startable USB drive. A plain copy won’t do it. A small, free program has to make the drive bootable, and it does the work for you:<br>Rufus (download it from rufus.ie), if you’re rescuing this one machine. Open Rufus, pick your USB drive at the top, click SELECT, and choose the Mint file you downloaded, then click START and let it run. A few minutes, and the drive holds a working Mint installer.
Ventoy (download it from ventoy.net), if you can already tell, you’ll do this more than once. Ventoy sets the drive up one time; after that, you just copy Mint — and any other system you like — straight onto it and choose at startup. Set it up once, and you carry a workbench in your pocket.
Your drive holds the installer now. Next, you get the machine to look at it. Here it starts to push back.<br>The machine won’t look
Plug the drive in and restart the computer. As it starts, you want the little menu that lets you pick what to start from — on most machines, you call it up by tapping a key the moment the maker’s logo flashes (often F12 , sometimes F9 or Esc ; many machines flash the right key on screen for a heartbeat).<br>Except the logo comes and goes before you catch it, and Windows loads as if you’d never touched a key. You try again. Same thing.<br>Clumsiness didn’t cause that, and neither did a slow machine. Microsoft set the computer to start too fast to interrupt — a small “convenience” that also happens to keep you locked inside Windows. This first lock works like a closing door, not a wall, and you’ll prop it open.<br>Get underneath: the setup screen.
Every computer carries a settings screen that lives beneath Windows — the firmware, the software the maker baked into the machine itself. Microsoft doesn’t run here, and here you’ll spend the next few minutes.<br>Restart, and this time tap the setup key steadily the instant the logo appears — usually F2 on a Dell, sometimes F1 , F10 , or Delete on other makes. Keep tapping until a plain, old-fashioned settings screen replaces the logo. Don’t let the look of it worry you; nothing here bites, and nothing you change sticks unless you save it.<br>Find the setting called Fast Boot (often under a heading like POST Behavior or Boot) and turn it off. That props the closing door open. While you’re at it, Windows keeps its own version of the same trick: back in Windows, open Control Panel...