In the first installment of Cool Tools, I explained what the series is all about: giving everyone the ability to set up and use a set of quality tools for statistical analysis. Now we get into the nitty-gritty of actually building the system that will do this for us.

Most of us either have or know someone that has an old PC lying around gathering dust. It works and all, but it's so old that no one has use for it anymore. That sort of PC is perfect for our low-budget purposes, particularly when we jazz it up with a new operating system. As long as the PC has a CD-ROM drive and a network card, we'll be able to use it.

"New operating system? That sounds complicated!" Well, it used to be pretty complicated. But what we'll be doing is installing a version of Linux on the system that has been built specifically to be easy to install and use.

Some of you may have heard of Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution and arguably the first to put ease of use as its first priority. Ubuntu's a great Linux distribution ("distro," as we Linux geeks like to call them), and if you're familiar with it, by all means feel free to use it. For the rest of you, I recommend a newer up-and-coming distro based on Ubuntu that in some ways beats it at its own ease-of-use game called Linux Mint.

The Linux Mint download page has links to an ISO file -- that's a CD-ROM image, which you should download onto a computer with a CD burner and burn onto a CD. The process for burning an ISO onto CD depends on what particular CD burning software you have on your computer; follow your software's instructions, or if that turns out to be a hurdle, try this link for directions on how to burn an ISO as well as some free software with which to do it.

Having done this, pop your newly burned Linux Mint CD into that old and dusty computer and start it up. The computer should boot from the CD, and after a short while you should see Linux Mint starting up. (Did the computer ignore the CD and instead boot to Windows, or whatever old operating system was on it? You may have to tell the computer to specifically boot from your CD-ROM drive. You can find some instructions for doing that on this page.) Linux Mint will run completely off of the CD, and not modify the computer at all unless you specifically tell it to.

Now that you've started up Linux Mint, play around with it some! Get used to the system. You can always check out the available community support services if you need help, or see if the User's Guide (pdf) answers your questions. When you feel comfortable with the system, you can simply double-click on the "Install" icon on the Mint desktop to permanently install the Linux Mint operating system permanently to the computer. The only potentially tricky part of the install process is when it asks how you want to "partition" the disk: if this is indeed a computer that was picking up dust, and you aren't worried about keeping its prior contents, the default "Guided - use entire disk" choice is fine, and the easiest way to go about things. Once Mint is permanently installed, you will no longer need the CD. Feel free to give it to a friend, so they can also enjoy a robust, stable and completely free operating system.

In the next installment, we'll discuss a few basics of using Linux Mint. Some of what we'll discuss you may have already have figured out from playing around with the system a bit -- and all the better! We'll cover things like program installation and some basic system maintenance tasks.