This is Alan Pope with the first screencast in the
Ubuntu Month of Screencasts.
All the screencasts in the Month of Screencasts can be
downloaded for free at our website,
which is screencasts.ubuntu.com
The subject of this first screencast is Ubuntu.
We are going to talk a little bit about the Ubuntu Foundation,
the project and the products.
Now the first thing to note is that I am pronouncing it incorrectly,
The official pronounciation is Ubuntu,
but I pronouce it Ubuntu, partly because I am lazy.
So what is Ubuntu?
Ubuntu is a Linux based operating system.
Now this could get a little bit technical for the first screencast,
so we are going to defer this until tommorow
and we will talk more about Linux and operating systems
in the next screencast.
But for now we will say Ubuntu is software that you run on a computer,
which is more or less accurate.
In a bit more detail, it is a Linux based operating system,
which is freely available with support from a community of volunteers,
so these are people that give their own time
to provide support on Ubuntu.
But also professional support from companies,
who will sell you support contracts.
The emphasis on Ubuntu is it being free of charge,
so you will never have to pay for the Ubuntu software product itself.
Licence freedom, which means that you can take copies of Ubuntu
and give it to your friends.
You can install it on multiple computers
and there are many other benefits to this licence freedom,
which we will talk about more in later screencasts.
And also ease of use, with each release of Ubuntu
the ease of use aspect has become better and better.
A lot of the time people argue that Ubuntu and Linux
is difficult to use, but more often than not this is down to unfamiliarity,
and what we seek to do with these screencasts
is make people more familiar with Ubuntu.
So let us start by talking about the Ubuntu Foundation.
The Ubuntu Foundation was set up a couple of years ago by Mark Shuttleworth
with a donation of ten million US dollars.
The idea behind the foundation is that it can provide support for Ubuntu
By support I am talking about bug fixes and security updates to the product.
But as I understand it the foundation is now dormant
it is not currently in use and the money is not being spent,
because there is a commercial sponsor for Ubuntu at the moment
and that is Cononical.
Now Canonical is a privately funded company,
set up again by Mark Shuttleworth.
Canonical have sponsored Ubuntu development so far
They also have other products that they work on
and you can see details on the Canonical website,
which is canonical.com
The main product that Canonical are well known for is Ubuntu.
We will talk a little bit more about Canonical as time goes on.
So the Ubuntu project, which was started by Mark Shuttleworth
within the project he has the nickname S.A.B.D.F.L. which is
Self Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life
a nickname that comes from the fact that he initially started the project
and provided the funding for the project.
So let us look at the project
Now the project, which is funded by either Canonical or the Ubuntu Foundation
provides a number of products
and some of them are listed at the bottom of this slide.
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu and we will talk more about those
again as we go through the screencasts.
We will mainly focus on Ubuntu throughout all of the screencasts
in the Month of Screencasts, because basically I have more
familiarity with Ubuntu than I do with any other of the products,
so it makes more sense for me to talk about that, than any of the others.
You can find out more information about each of the other products
within the Ubuntu project by visiting each of their websites.
ubuntu.com, edubuntu.org, xubuntu.org and kubuntu.org.
Links to these websites will be provided on our website.
They are all much the same, they have the same foundation within them,
but Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Kubuntu have a slightly different user interface,
slightly different look and feel, but they all are much the same.
Now Ubuntu releases every six months, they are time based releases.
The first release was version four point ten and the numbering system comes,
the four is the year two thousand and four
and the ten is the tenth month.
so the release date for version four ten was October two thousand and four.
The reason why in this slide it has a line through it is
because it is now end of life, it is no longer supported.
You can of course still run it on your computer,
but you will not get security updates and you will not get bug fixes
to that version of Ubuntu, so it is recommended to upgrade at some point.
As you can see from this slide that there have been
successive releases roughly every six months.
The current stable release is seven point zero four.
with a new release coming out in October, seven ten.
You will notice that each version has a name associated with it,
this development codename is assigned early on in the development life cycle.
Often you will find the developers refer to the versions by their name,
rather than their version number.
Also worth noting is the LTS tag, the Long Term Support
Releases of Ubuntu the have the LTS tag are
supported for longer than the the standard releases of Ubuntu
A standard version will be supported for eighteen months
LTS releases are supported for three years on the desktop
and five years on a server.
For example 6.06 is supported until two thousand and nine on the desktop
and two thousand and eleven on a server.
So where do you get Ubuntu?
Well, if you go to ubuntu.com, there is a download link on the left hand side,
where you can download an image of a CD.
Which you can then write on to a blank CD
and then boot from it and try it out.
We have covered this in some detail in previous screencasts.
If you go to screencasts.ubuntu.com you can see how to
download and burn an image to CD.
Alternatively you can visited shipit.ubuntu.com
and order CDs to be sent to you directly.
You can order just one or you can order a pack of more than one,
if you want to share them with friends or colleague at work
or hand them out at an event.
You can share those CDs with your community.
And speaking of community, another aspect of Ubuntu
is the vast community of people working on the product.
As an example there is a team of people working on the
documentation for Ubuntu
and this team is mostly not paid to work on Ubuntu.
These are volunteers who edit the documentation
and this is the documentation you see in Ubuntu, when you have
booted up into Ubuntu.
You can also access it via these three websites.
Links to these websites will be on the screencasts site.
This documentation is incredibly detailed
and provides lots of information.
There is also another side to the community,
which is a website called Launchpad.
Launchpad is very tightly integrated with Ubuntu
and the Ubuntu development process.
Within launchpad you can register projects
and Ubuntu is a project registered on the website.
You can file bugs in projects on the launchpad website
and create specifications for new products.
You can translate the software within launchpad
and ask support questions in launchpad.
The vast majority of the work done within launchpad
is done by volunteers, members of the community
who want to see ubuntu grow.
Lets have a look at a couple of other areas of the community.
This website is called the Ubuntu Planet, planet.ubuntu.com
and this is an aggregation of blogs.
These are the opinions of people who use Ubuntu
and recommend Ubuntu to other people.
You can see down the right hand side a number of people listed there
who's blogs are aggregated.
Here is another element of the community, the Ubuntu forums.
There is a massive amount of knowledge and a number of people here,
who can help you with your Ubuntu system.
These people may be running Ubuntu themselves
and they may be able to provide support with issues
you might have with you Ubuntu system.
There is an incredible amount of people there waiting to helps you.
Finally here is just a quick look over the Ubuntu desktop.
We are going to look at it in much more detail over the course
of the other screencasts.
You can see here, there is a menu with applications
and a desktop in the background,
icons on the toolbar and most of the kind of thing that people are
familiar with, with an operating system.
I just wanted to show a quick teaser of things to come.
Thanks for watching.
All of our screencasts are available on website,
screencasts.ubuntu.com