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After a brief reminder of the performance goals of the LHC, the overall strategy proposed for commissioning the machine with protons is presented. A thorough commissioning of the LHC hardware systems, presently ongoing, will lead into a staged approach for the first two years of operation with the beam, allowing both the complexity of the machine operation and the destructive power of the high intensity beams to be introduced in a controlled, incremental manner. The demands on the annual machine schedule are discussed, including the need to incorporate dedicated running for ions and proton-proton total cross section measurements. An important pre-commissioning milestone is the injection of the beam into a sector of the partially completed LHC; the motivation and tests planned are briefly summarised.
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