How to install Linux Part 1 - preparation and persistent usbs
But before this I feel I should explain some things, Windows 8 with efi protection secure boot or what ever it's called, I haven't been able to work out how to install it and get it running off the hard drive, so for now, your only choice is to run it live, secondly, there's 2 ways to run linux live (off a usb at least, cd's are possible, but it's more work than what it's worth) there's Live, and there's persistent. the differences are as follows Live: You can do everything you want, you'll just lose the settings when you restart Persistent: Basically your thumb drive becomes the hard drive so you can save everything you need, although in some cases and configurations this is somewhat not recommended as the computer will be making constant read/writes to the thumb drive which lessens the thumb drives life.
Now that's out of the way, for a persistent linux mint xfce What you'll need: UNetbootin - This program will do pretty much everything technical
A Linux ISO of your choosing - I'm recommending linux mint xfce for this, but there's many others that are suitable (or you can use UNetbootin to get one) but I prefer to get mine and save them somewhere so if something goes wrong I can get them again, also for me I get them unmetered from here(Telstra) or a quick google search can usually get you somewhere "<your isp here> linux mirror" or something along those lines should work, it does in Australia at least with the major players, unsure about overseas though.
A usb drive - anything over 2GB is plenty - I could've sworn it was more, but I'm getting a bit of info from some forums now and it seems adamant most don't need more than that Method Note, I would write this up myself, but this is just as straight forward and quite simple too: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unetbootin/wiki/guide The persistence thing down the bottom where it says ubuntu only, don't believe it, I've done it in the past and it's worked fine as a persistent system with mint, the persistence should be at least a gig if you're going to use linux off the thumb drive...
but! you can leave it as 0 if you are planning on installing it to the hard disk anyway
So you've followed the instructions and made a live usb, plug the usb into the computer you want to try running linux on, Turn on your computer and get into the bios, usually you have to press delete or f2 or something like that when your computer is just starting up, you wanna find something like boot options or statup, then with luck there should be an option to boot from usb, sometimes it's under the hard drive and with some very odd occasions you wont be able to at all, like it wont show up anywhere. (message me if you need a hand with finding the option, I'll get back to you when I can). then continue with boot up. With a whole lot of luck it will start to boot your new linux system! It will be slow, and it will occasionally play up for no reason off the usb, but it will give you a taste. Persistent users may stop here, live users will want to refer to part 2 along with anyone with a cd drive who wants to install it that way