Drupal 7 is a Web application; you don't install it as you would a MAKE file or a shell script.
What you need to do is make sure that Apache2, PHP5 (and GD for image processing), and MySQL are installed correctly. I don't use Linux Mint, but I'm assuming it has apt
so the following will work:
sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 mysql-server php5-mysql php5-gd
Once that's done, you can follow the instructions on Drupal's Website, but basically once Drupal has been extracted in your webroot and the correct permissions are set, you can just visit yourwebsite.com or your.linux.ip.address in your browser and the install/pre-requisites check will run automatically.
Note: you might want to go with 6.2 right now if you're interested in 3rd-party modules: from what I've seen, most of them haven't been updated to work with 7.0 yet or they're still in alpha form.