What are the details of your mining goals?

I mean like are you planning on CPU or GPU mining, solo or pool, and what mining software?

XMR-stak seems to be the most popular mining software, so I'll presume that one for now and see if I can get it running on my ancient hardware.

Upon rereading, I see that you say it's installed already. Did you install the miner via command line, or by downloading and decompressing an archive? I could probably walk you through simply starting it up with that info, I have over a decade of daily-driver experience with linux mint and about as much with coding too.