Hello, My name is Alan Pope and welcome to this screencast.
In this screencast we are going to look at downloading and burning the ISO image of Ubuntu
We are going to do this on a Windows Computer that's not yet had Ubuntu installed.
So first of all we are going to log on to the Windows XP desktop.
This is a pretty standard install of Windows XP,
that's had all of the usual security patches, for what they are worth, applied.
Now, we start up Internet Explorer
I have set a few homepages here,
to make it is easier for me to get back to these pages later
as we go through the screencast.
Here is the Ubuntu homepage.
Now over on the right hand side here you can see the ShipIt service,
where we can order free CDs.
And on the left we have the ability to download CD images.
If I click that link it takes me to the Downloading Ubuntu page.
And here you can see there are currently two releases that we can choose from.
The newest release otherwise known as Edgy Eft, version 6.10
And there's also the Ubuntu with Long Term Support (LTS),
which is otherwise known as Dapper Drake, version 6.06
Notice 6.10 means that it was released in 2006, October.
and 6.06 is 2006, June.
Down here you can see the mirrors
from which we can download download the images of the CD.
Now mirror is just a site that contains a copy of the Ubuntu site.
So you can see there's lots of mirrors dotted all around the world,
you should choose the mirror nearest to you.
Now I've selected the mirror that's nearest to me in the UK
and this is what we get, a listing full of files that we could download.
Now you'll notice they're all called Ubuntu,
If we go to the parent directory,
you'll see there's also images for Kubuntu, which is the KDE derivative.
and Edubuntu.
If we go back into the 6.06 directory,
you can also see that actually 6.06 is linked to dapper,
so 6.06, Dapper is the codename for that release.
So here we have the Ubuntu images, version 6.06
Now it says -1, that means this is a release that was made after 6.06 came out.
In fact you can see the files are date stamped in August.
Now there are lots of different types of CD, alternate, desktop, server.
The server CDs are usually used for... well servers that are in some kind of data center,
usually without a GUI.
The desktop CD is a live CD, you can boot from
and the alternate CD is often used in situations where the desktop CD doesn't work.
Maybe if you have a strange set of hardware on your desktop.
Next we have the chipset that is used in your machine.
This could be Intel based, AMD64 based, PowerPC based or SPARC.
Finally there's a number of different files within each category,
this is the one we're going to grab, the desktop CD for i386.
Notice there's ISO images, Torrent files and Jigdo files.
We're going to grab this ISO here.
There's a few ways you can download this.
There's also a Torrent file, which you can see is much smaller,
it isn't actually the image, you need a third party product like BitTornado here.
I've already downloaded and installed BitTornado on this Windows machine.
What BitTornado is, is a Bittorrent client,
this is a peer to peer software that can allow you to legitimately download software.
So if I click the Torrent file it should open with BitTornado.
Now the Windows firewall has popped up to say
we've got a program here that's trying to access the Internet.
Do we want to block it or unblock it
or postpone this until later.
This is the Windows firewall, other firewalls will do a similar thing.
If we allow it to access the Internet,
then we can choose where we want to save the ISO image.
And then BitTornado starts downloading.
Now I've already downloaded the ISO image, so actually I'm going to close this,
And I've downloaded that ISO image.
There's another option here and that's Jigdo,
Now this isn't available for every image,
this is just another alternative way to download the image.
Generally most people don't use that.
Most people use the ISO image or Bittorrent.
Now here's the ISO image, you can see it's quite large 700MB.
About the size of a CD.
Now before we burn it onto a CD, we want to make sure that we downloaded it successfully.
We can do that by running a checksum program on it.
And this program here HashTab can perform a checksum on the file.
I've already downloaded and installed this as well.
There's the download.
Once you've installed it, you can then right-click an ISO image,
choose properties
and you'll see you get an extra tab here called File Hashes.
And as soon as you flick to that tab it starts calculating mathematically
a checksum, it's a called an MD5 hash.
And if we go back to where we downloaded the file from,
you can see we've got this file full of MD5 sums or hashes,
for each of the different ISO images.
This is the one that we downloaded and so this is MD5 sum or hash value,
the computed value and if we copy that.
and go back to where our hash was being calculated and paste it in here.
When we hit compare, it tells us the hashes match.
So therefore the ISO image was downloaded successfully and it's not corrupt in any way.
Now that we've downloaded it we might want to burn it onto a CD.
There's a free CD burning bit of software called ImgBurn
Again I've already downloaded and installed this on this Windows PC
and there's the download.
Once you've installed it, you can right-click an ISO image
and choose Burn using ImgBurn.
Now it's slightly unfortunate that this PC doesn't actually have a CD burner built-in.
So I can't show you the burning, but that bit is not really particularly interesting.
Here's ImgBurn opened, it's opened the ISO image, it looks at the detail about
the ISO image there or type of file it is.
And then down here you can see it says no CD writers detected,
so it can't actually burn it.
If it did find a CD burner, then down here we'd find this button would be illuminated
and I could press that button and that would then burn the ISO image on to a CD.
Obviously you could use any CD burning software.
But it must burn the image on to the CD
Now let's assume I've burnt that and inserted the CD into my CD-ROM drive.
You can see there my Ubuntu CD is in the drive
Now under Windows I can actually open this CD
and there is autoplay on it, so if you insert it while Windows is running,
it should automatically start this application you're seeing now.
There's a number of Windows applications on the Ubuntu live Desktop CD.
It's only on the live desktop CD, not the server or alternate CD.
You can see here there's a number of applications that you might want to try out under Windows.
Open source applications of course.
There's a web browser, email client, word processor,
instant messenger and graphical editor.
Each of these can be installed on Windows, straight from the CD
These are all part of the OpenCD project, which is separately available.
Now alternatively you can boot from this CD and try Ubuntu out
and maybe even install it if you choose to.
And that will be the subject of another screencast.
So in summary, you can get the ISO image from the Ubuntu Mirrors,
download it, check it, then burn it and then either view it from Windows
or reboot and boot to it, to get Ubuntu.
Thanks for watching.