The Linux Mint arm64 Live ISO contains a Linux Mint Debian Edition live system which can be used to try out Linux Mint on arm64 machines or virtualized in a virtual machine on arm64 hardware. From within the live system it is possible to install Linux Mint arm64 directly onto a hard drive or on a virtual hard drive in a VM. The installer can be launched from the Desktop in the live system by clicking “Install Debian”. The installer is based on Calamares and is a very easy to use program to install Linux Mint onto a drive. It will take approximately 5 minutes in total to have the whole system copied onto the drive on a Mac Mini M1.
Installation in virtual machines have been shown to work. Linux Mint arm64 has been tested successfully in Parallels Desktop and UTM. The latter is a free program, which can be downloaded from the net.
Setting up a Shared folder in Parallels works out of the box if you install Linux Mint arm64 using Calamares in the live environment.
Setting up a Shared folder in UTM is explained here. You basically have to add an entry in /etc/fstab. One thing I had to do additionally is to change the owner of the /mnt/utm folder to myself (as root) with chown -R your_user_name:your_user_name /mnt/utm
Installing Linux Mint from within the Live environment is the default way of installing Linux Mint arm64 onto a drive. The Calamares installer does however not work with more difficult setups, like LVM. If you want to create LVM or other more advanced setups, you should use the NETINST iso.
The possibility to boot into Debian Installer directly from GRUB after a boot of the live image has been removed as live-installer is not ready for production use1.
When live-installer is fixed in the future, the option to boot into it from the live iso will be restored.
Calamares Installer from within the live system
YouTube instruction Videos:
Installing Linux Mint arm64 from the live system
1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1110534#35