Installation Guide

Booting the Live environment

Booting the Live environment, whether from CD/DVD or USB flash drive, will give you an overview of the CalinixOS environment and let you test how well it will run on your machine. This is very useful to check before committing to install a new operating system! For best results you should be connected to the Internet. If you have a wired Ethernet connection, and plug in before booting the Live environment, CalinixOS will automatically set up a connection. If you have a wireless (Wi-Fi) connection you can set up the wireless network once you have reached the CalinixOS desktop. Just click the arrow icon in the taskbar

And click the Network Manager applet (which will probably show a <-> sign if not connected). Connect to internet using the applet.

The method of selecting the boot device varies considerably across machines. You may need to spam (tap continuosly) one key, for example Esc, Del, or F10, to select the boot device. Or, you may need to set the option in your BIOS. If you’re not sure, your machine’s user guide will have detail of the method you need, alternatively a web search will also quickly turn up the answer.

Note

On Macs, keep your finger pressed on the Alt or Option key after hearing the boot sound.

BIOS vs UEFI

Note

UEFI is the commonly agreed on name for both the EFI & UEFI standards which merged. It does not include the old EFI v1, or Apple’s own non-standard version of EFI.

Some newer hardware do not use the well-known BIOS to manage boot options. Instead, a new one named UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is used. It still has BIOS-like menus and often has a legacy mode, which uses BIOS. UEFI often goes hand in hand with the infamous Secure Boot option that makes it more difficult to boot operating systems outside of a select few. If your computer came with Microsoft Windows 8 or later installed, your computer probably uses UEFI and has Secure Boot enabled by default.

However, the Linux community reacted to this and developed means to install and boot Linux on those systems as well. Some installers, such as Calamares which is used by CalinixOS, can even automate the process so it makes virtually no difference to the user whether their machine uses UEFI or BIOS.

Booting in UEFI mode

The most important step is to ensure that your machine does not have Fast Boot enabled. Only a very limited number of operating systems will boot with this enabled. You must disable Fast Boot in your UEFI/BIOS before proceeding; if you don’t know how to do this please refer to your computer’s user manual, as it differs for all computers.