What flavor of Linux?
The first choice which presents itself in this process is: What Linux Distribution to use. I spent more than a day looking around and reading reviews etc. and I ended up choosing UBUNTU. At least at this time it seems to be the most popular flavor and it is highly recommended for non-geek users who are new to the Linux world. The backers of the distribution, Canonical Ltd
. from South Africa, seem to be fully committed to the Open Source movement (so much so that you are informed each time you try to install anything that is not truly Open Source) and to maintaining Ubuntu as a free distribution 'forever'.
There are several versions of Ubuntu currently available. The one I am using for this series is nicknamed Hardy Heron and is numbered 8.04 (this number means that it was released in April, 2008). This is what is called an LTS (Long Term Support) release, with support guaranteed for 3 years from release date (i.e. until April 2011) for the desktop version, and 5 years for the server version.
The next choice to make is between the Server or Desktop versions (a no brainer for us) and between the 32 bit and 64 bit version. If you don't have a 64 bit processor skip down to Downloading, otherwise read on.
I chose not to use the 64 bit version (only one of my PCs is a 64 bit processor) since I had read of all kinds of problems with the 64 bit versions of just about ALL software – including Windows. It now seems that these problems have been mostly resolved, however, there still is an issue with availability of packages for the 64 bit distributions.
This would not be a show stopper since you can get 32 bit packages to run on a 64 bit distribution, but I wanted to be able to have identical installations on all my PCs to make maintenance easier and I did not think that performance degradation, if any, on the 64 bit processor would be an issue. If you choose, like me, to install the 32 bit version on your 64 bit PC, you probably will run into the one issue that I did consider to be significant. The out of the box 32 bit Hardy Heron does not recognize memory above about 3 GB. This problem is easy to fix. I have posted an article with a short How To right here. It requires using the command line but it's quite simple and will only take you about 5 minutes.
Downloading
The distribution of Ubuntu comes as a download from the Canonical site or alternatively many other sites, that are set up as secondary download alternatives. Once you download it you have to burn it to a CD as an .iso image (that means a bootable CD). If you have Nero or some other CD burner you can use that. If not there are many freely available CD burners that have the ability to burn .iso's – just Google it! (You can even find places that will mail you a free CD already recorded if for some reason you can't do it yourself.)
The Distro CD gives you several options when you put it into your CD player, among them to install Ubuntu or alternatively to run it from the CD, just to try it out. I'm assuming that you are in this for real, so, just put it into the CD player on your PC and choose Install.
Installing
After answering a few basic questions you will come to the only part of the installation that requires you to make decisions – the setting up of the disk partitions on your PC. I would recommend that you partition your disk into 3 areas. To do this you need to use the MANUAL option on the partitioning screen.
The 3 areas you will set up are as follows:
1 – For the base Linux installation (mount point /). This is where all the operating system software goes and all of the optional packages that you will later be installing will go. This partition needs, as a minimum, about 4 GB of disk, but if you have a PC with a big disk give it more – between 10 and 20 GB. This will make sure that you will never run out of space to install new software.
2 – For your data (mount point /home) allow it to take all of the rest of the disk except for:
3 – The Swap area. This area will be automatically reserved by Linux to be about twice the amount of memory that your PC has. It is the equivalent of the PAGEFILE in Windows and allows for virtual memory space.
The reason that I am recommending this basic setup is the following: If you EVER have to re-install Ubuntu (or another flavor of Linux like Debian etc.) because your system got bombed or because you want to upgrade, say to the 64 bit version, or to a newer release of Ubuntu, you can do it painlessly and without risk of loosing any of your data or application settings.
I had the misfortune to not know this when I started. I set my Ubuntu up using the Automatic – use the whole disk option. If you have also done this in a prior installation, not to worry. It's relatively easy to rearrange the stuff on your disk. If this is your case, I have included a small How To to get the disk partitioned correctly, which will save all of your settings and data, that is assuming that you have already gone ahead and used the system. If not, you can just start over and do the install over the single partition one.
Running
Once the install is completed you will be prompted to restart the computer and to remove the CD. Once you have done this you are finished! You have a working Ubuntu installation.
Updating
If you are connected to the Internet during this process, after the initial boot into Ubuntu, you will get an advisory on the top of your screen that there are updates to be installed. Clicking on the button (either a red downward pointed arrow or an orange multi pointed star) will start up the Update Manager which will tell you about the updates. Clicking on the Install Updates button in the Manager window will initiate this process – by asking for your password that you created in the installation process.
Depending on which version of the system you downloaded this could be a quick process, or it could take quite some time – it will tell you how much data will be downloaded before starting. When it is completed you may be asked to re-boot your computer, or not, depending on the nature of the changes that have bee applied.
This process of updating the system will happen periodically as Canonical releases updates to the packages that you have installed.
