This is Alan Pope with the ninth screencast in the Ubuntu Month of Screencasts.
All the screencasts in this month can be downloaded from our website,
which is screencasts.ubuntu.com
In this screencast we are going to look at installing Ubuntu using a live CD.
I've called this part 1 because we are going to look at installing via different methods
in subsequent screencasts.
Now there's different version of Ubuntu we've talked about in other screencasts,
there's Ubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu and Kubuntu
and the installation process is much the same for all of them.
But the end result is slightly different,
you get a different look and feel for each of them.
But pretty much everything I say throughout this screencast holds true for each of them.
You can get hold of CDs and images of CDs for all of the versions of Ubuntu.
and go through pretty much the same process to get an install.
The version of Ubuntu we are going to use is 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.
Now, this version isn't actually out yet, it's still under development,
So this is released in October, which is about a month from now.
I wouldn't recommend that general users install version 7.10,
because it is changing a lot, it's under development and things break now and then.
So I strongly recommend you install 7.04 or 6.06
or whatever is the current stable version
at the time that you're watching this screencast.
And right now that is 7.04 Feisty Fawn or 6.10 or 6.06
You can get hold of Ubuntu from the Ubuntu website, which is ubuntu.com
There's a link on the left hand side to Get Ubuntu.
and you can download it directly from the website
Alternatively you can order a CD and have it shipped to you.
And there's a separate website for this
There is actually a link from the ubuntu.com that says request free CDs
and you can also get them from ShipIt, shipit.ubuntu.com,
where you can order a number of CDs
The CD I am using I actually downloaded from ubuntu.com and burned.
And then inserted into a PC and booted up.
And what you will see next is what happens when you first boot off of the Ubuntu live CD
It's also called the Desktop CD.
So this is the menu you see and you can
navigate through the menu with the up and down arrows
Press enter to select the option you want
There are also some function keys along the bottom.
If we press F1, we get some on-line help,
It tells us what the function keys do
and also tells you when this CD image was created.
F2 allows you to choose the language under which the installer will run.
F3 allows you to change the keyboard layout
and I'm going to change it to United Kingdom, because that's where I am.
F4 allows you to change the video resolution.
This might be useful if your video card is a bit quirky
and doesn't like the resolution that the system boots up in.
And F5 gives you some accessibility options.
For example, there's a high contrast option if your eyesight is not fantastic,
for example you might want to use that.
F6 we will come back to in just a minute.
So the list of options we've got, the first one is "Start or install Ubuntu".
"Start" means boot in to the live environment and use it,
"install" means install it to the hard drive and you can do both with that option.
The second option is useful if you have a dodgy video card that doesn't work very well
with the Ubuntu system, so maybe you could use that to boot safe graphics mode.
"Install with a driver update CD" is useful if you have very very new bit of hardware like
a very new disk controller that's not supported by the standard process.
"OEM install" is useful for people who are building systems for other people,
Original Equipment Manufacturers
and that allows the end user to put in their own details
like their name and their password,
on the first time they boot it up.
"Check CD for defects", well it's pretty obvious what that does,
it checks to make sure the CD is correct.
"Memory test" is useful to diagnose problems with memory in the computer,
which often plague computer users.
And the last one is "Boot from first hard disk" is useful if you have messed up the
boot sector on your first hard disk.
If I press F6 you can see these options appear down the bottom.
Now these are useful in that you can change these
and for example someone might recommend to diagnose a problem
you type in an extra parameter, which you could just type on the end of that line.
or they might ask for more information by getting rid of the "quiet" and the "splash"
I'm just going to boot normally, so I will just press enter.
Now when you press enter you get this bouncing orange bar as it boots up.
It takes a little while, I've kind of skipped some time now,
so we're not going to sit and watch that bouncing backwards and forwards for too long.
Now it's worth noting that we are booting off of a CD
and we're running off of a CD,
so if it feels a bit slow, a bit sluggish that's understandable,
because you're loading all of your programs from
a compressed image that's on a slow device.
A CD is a relatively slow device compared to a hard disk for example.
So don't think that it's indicative of how fast the system will perform
when you are using it off of a CD.
It will be much faster once you have installed Ubuntu on to your hard disk.
Once it's finished making the progress across the screen,
you will eventually get the desktop.
Now in order to fit this on the screen,
I've had to crop about 80 pixels from the bottom of the screen.
So there's normally a little panel at the bottom of the screen,
you can't see it because I had to crop that so that it fits.
So eventually we get our desktop, it doesn't take too long,
it's only a couple of minutes or so, on a relatively modern PC.
If you have an slower, older PC, then you might want to try Xubuntu instead.
Xubuntu starts with an X and has a more lightweight windowing system.
Okay so we are booted up and over here you can see there is an icon
to install Ubuntu on to the hard drive.
We can actually just use the system as it is,
booting directly from the CD and use the applications that are installed
But as the subject of this screencast is to install Ubuntu,
I am going to run the installer.
Now the installer gives us a warning,
reminding us that this is not the final release of version 7.10
So you shouldn't really use it on a productive system.
It also recommends that you take a full backup of any valuable data.
Now I'm going to be installing on a completely blank, brand new 100GB disk,
so there's nothing on it, I'm happy that that's okay.
When you press forward you have the option of going to the release notes
and I have Internet access here, the little icon in the top right is the Network Manager
that says I've got network access.
So I could click this button and it would fire up the web browser
and I could view the release notes for this version,
but I'm not going to do that.
I can choose the language that I want the installer to run in and click forward.
The choose the region that I am in and the nearest city to me.
This is so that we can get the time zone and clock correct.
So I click on London, which is the nearest city to me
and you can see it has chosen BST, which is my local time zone
and the current time is correct.
Click forward and now it asks me what keyboard layout I'm using.
Notice it's picked up United Kingdom,
because of the options I've chosen earlier on.
And there may be multiple keyboard layouts within your region,
and you can try them out by typing characters in here.
You can try various characters that you know
are sometimes on the wrong place on your keyboard,
if you have the wrong layout.
and then choose forward when you are happy with the layout you've got.
Now it starts the partitioner, which is thing that a lot of new people to
Linux and Ubuntu have trouble with.
So we will cover this in a little bit of detail.
Now remember I've got one 100GB disk, it's a completely blank disk.
and the defaults I have here is to wipe the entire disk.
and for Ubuntu to partition the disk and use that entire disk.
The second option is manual partitioning, which is what we are going to use.
There is actually a third option that appears,
if you've already got an operating system installed.
If I for example have Windows on this system,
It would give me the option of resizing the Windows partition down.
I am going to use manual.
Now when I choose manual and go forward,
you can see here, it notes the device that I have is /dev/sda.
sda means the first hard disk.
a being the first one, b being the second and so on.
Now this is a brand new clean hard disk, so I need to create a new partition table,
because this disk has never had any information on it.
So I hit the new partition table button and then click continue.
You wouldn't have to this if the disk had ever been used before
or it had a partition table already on it.
So now we have, sda has a chunk of free space.
and it's about 100GB of free space.
Now I get the option to create a new partition.
Now in the text just below that it tells you what it recommends
a 2GB root partition, for / being the root mount point.
and some swap as well.
Now the default is to use the entire disk, starting from the beginning of the disk.
Now we will change this size here, it's measured in Megabytes
I'll change that and make it smaller, I'll make it 10GB or something like that.
You can choose whether the partition sits at the beginning,
the front of the disk or at the end of the disk.
And also the partition type, the default is EXT3,
which is a journaling file system.
It's pretty reliable, robust and used very widely.
EXT2 is another variant of EXT3 without the journaling.
Other options include Reiserfs, which is going down in popularity at the moment.
JFS. XFS is popular in media center computers,
where you have very large files, like TV programs for example.
FAT32 is popular on Windows and also with USB sticks
and USB hard drives that you want to interchange between
Windows and non-Windows platforms.
I'm just going to choose EXT3 though.
And you'll notice there are no mount points defined.
So the mount point I'm going to use is /
which is root, the top level of the disk hierarchy.
And I'm going to change the amount of size, in MBs,
so that it's not 100GB, because that's too much.
I'm just going to give it 10GB or there abouts.
I've just lopped the last number off, so it makes it roughly 10GB.
And when I hit Ok, you can see there, it does a little bit of a calculation
And we should see the first partition, the first partition on the first disk.
So the first disk is /dev/sda and the first partition will be number 1.
So it should be, /dev/sda1 will be the first partition.
You can see there it's a 10GB partition, it needs formatting,
it's going to be mounted as root, which is that slash (/).
And the partition type is EXT2, it's going to be formatted as a...
Err sorry, EXT3. It's going to be formatted as an EXT3 partition,
And we have got ~90GB of free space, so let's create another partition,
Now the notes down here says it needs a swap partition of at least 256 MB
Swap is (in simplistic terms) an extension
of the physical memory you have in your computer.
So I'm just going to use 1GB swap,
This machine has 1GB RAM, so I'm going to give it 1 GB of swap.
Depends on who you ask, some people say you should have twice the amount of RAM as swap,
some people say half, some people say none.
I'm not going to go in to that, I'll just create one of the same amount.
So now that I've created a swap part you can see the mount point is blank,
because I don't need to mount that at a certain point in the directory tree.
So we should have a second partition now,
which will be /dev/sda2 and that will be swap.
Now that's all I need to actually install Ubuntu is a root partition and a swap partition.
But I'm going to create a third partition to put all of my files in.
So I'm going to have 10GB root, that's for all the system files,
libraries and all that kind of stuff.
But I'm also going to have another partition for my home directory,
which is where all the bulk of my data will be.
All my documents and TV programs that I have recorded
and audio files I may have downloaded.
So I've got a nice big chunk of space there, ~90GB or so.
and I'm going to make that EXT3
and it's going to be mounted as /home.
Which means that all the users on this system,
their home directories will be under that path.
So there will be ~96GB of space to share amongst all my users.
And the system gets 10GB for it's use.
Of course this can be re-configured later on and you could re-size things later on.
But this would be a good start.
There's an extra benefit of this, which is I could re-install the operating system on sda1
and that won't touch all of my files that are in my home directory,
which will be on sda3, the third partition that it is about to create.
So there we have it, we now have three partitions sda1, sda2 and sda3.
sda1 is my root, sda2 is swap
and sda3 is my home directories with plenty of space.
The two EXT3 partitions are going to be formatted.
So it's not too difficult, so long as you get the sizes right and the right mount points.
Let's move on.
Now the migration tool is useful if you already have Windows installed on this PC,
I don't, but if I did it would give me the opportunity of migrating things like email,
browser favorites and other documents from the My Documents folder and so on,
on the Windows partition and bring those into my Ubuntu partition.
It's very good Migration tool, very useful.
Next it wants to know my name, now this is going to be the first person,
the first user id that gets created on the system
and this will have some administrative rights, which could be changed later on.
So I'll fill in a username and password.
You can add additional users later as well, of course.
This will just be the first user.
And we give the computer a name.
So this is going to be my hostname on the network,
so this is how my computer appears on the network.
Click next.
And that's all the questions it asks you,
The rest is just a summary of what it says it's going to do,
so at the top here we can see the language settings,
the user that it's going to create and the region.
The migration assistant isn't being used because I don't have Windows on this machine.
It's a blank disk.
And then it gives a summary of what it's going to do to the disk.
So we're going to have three partitions /, swap and /home.
And there's an Advance button over here,
where we can specify the boot loader.
The boot loader is a program called Grub, it's the menu you first see,
Sometimes you don't see it because it counts down for a few seconds and then disappears.
But it's the first thing you see when you boot up your Ubuntu system.
and you can choose which disk you install that boot loader on.
So if you had multiple disks you can choose which disk it goes on,
hd0 being the first disk.
There's also an option here to switch on the popularity contest.
Popularity Contest or sometimes just known as popcon,
is a tool that records which applications you have
and submits that back to Ubuntu, so that they can
well basically know the popularity of the applications that users are using.
It doesn't really record what you use, just which ones you install.
So I've ticked that box and I click forward and now the installation starts.
Now I'm skipping forward in time a little bit here
I'm cheating a little.
Something that's worth noting is that you can go off and use the system.
But it will slow the system down a little bit, while you're installing and using it.
Another thing that's useful to know is this package manager here,
you can install additional software before you start the installtion to disk.
So you're running off of a read only medium, the CD,
you can actually software in to memory
and then start the installation on to the hard disk.
And whatever you install into memory will then be installed on the hard disk.
Which is quite a useful feature.
So what will happen is, if we go and look at the file system
that's currently in use on this live running environment.
If I double-click the file system option,
you can see all these folders here contain the files
that will be dropped on to the hard disk.
And if I were to run the Synaptic Package Manager
and install software, it would be installed into those folders.
and then those folders would be dropped on to the hard disk,
and then I would end up with that software kind of pre-installed if you like.
So now it's going through formatting the partitions.
There are a little large so it's going to take a little while to format those.
Now of course you don't have to have a separate /home partition,
but as I said it useful to do that, because later on I could decide to
change the version of Ubuntu I'm using
or even completely change distribution.
I might decide I don't like Ubuntu and I want to change to
Debian or Red Hat or Fedora or something else.
And you could install the replacement operating system
in the first partition, the root partition
and it would leave your /home partition alone.
It wouldn't touch your /home partition.
and the benefit of that is of course all your data stays intact.
All your settings stay intact as well.
So if you install software under that new distribution,
It should just carry on working, subject to some limitations,
as it did under your previous installation.
It's a very useful way of partitioning the disk up.
Some people partition the disk even further and have multiple partitions for
/, /var, /tmp. /home and so on and so on.
But these days with disks being very large and plenty of space.
That's not so common.
One of the reasons people tend to do it is to ensure that for example
a log file that builds up in the /var directory doesn't cause the system
to completely run out of disk space and then cause problems for the user.
So we're getting towards the end of the installation now.
Depending upon the hardware specification of your PC,
this could take up to maybe half an hour,
maybe even an hour on a fairly slow system.
You need to have really at least 256MB of RAM
to be able to boot off the live environment and install.
Ideally you would have more than 256MB of RAM,
because you need to have the live environment running
and this installer program, which is called Ubiquity.
That's the installer that we're running right now.
If you have less than 256MB of RAM,
then you might want to try the alternate CD,
which we will cover in the next screencast.
So that's it, the installation has finished,
if we want to we can continue to use the live environment.
If you are in the middle of editing documents and so on, you can just carry on doing so.
and you could save those documents on to a USB stick
or save them on to the local partitions that you have now formatted.
Alternatively you could, if you haven't got any documents open,
or any files open you can just hit the Restart now button.
And it will shutdown, ask you to eject the CD
and then when you reboot the first thing you should see graphic-wise
is the logon screen, which is this screen here.
I type in my user name and password and hopefully we should get the desktop up.
There we go and it's much quicker than when it boots off of the CD,
because we are now booting off the hard drive, which is orders of magnitude faster.
So this is booted now to version 7.10 Gutsy.
and here we've got our Applications, Places and System menus,
which we have covered in previous screencasts.
And over on the right-hand side
we've got a notification that there's some software updates.
So the CD that I downloaded, since that CD was pressed
there have been, how many? 96 updates made to Ubuntu.
Because this is the development version, it's changing rapidly.
There's a fast user switching tool there,
we have the little applet for doing searches,
we have Network Manager,
sound control and all kinds of other really groovy stuff
that we will cover in other screencasts.
So that's basically it for installing Ubuntu from a live CD.
I hope that was useful.
You can find further screencasts on our website,
screencasts.ubuntu.com