This is a screencast about Xubuntu,
however you like to say it.
Xubuntu is a flavor of Ubuntu that features the XFCE desktop,
which typically requires fewer system resources,
less fast processor, less RAM, things like that.
and is therefore really popular for users of old machines.
So if you are trying to get Ubuntu on to a lower spec machine,
older components, this is a great one to try out.
You can find their web page at xubuntu.org,
which of course features all the different CDs that you can download
in the usual way.
For this demo I will use the 7.04, which is the Feisty Fawn edition.
You an choose which country best suites your downloading needs.
In this case since I'm in the US, I'll choose the United States.
And once you've gotten into that site,
you can choose what kind of CD you want to download.
Now it kind of depends on the Xubuntu bean for spec machines.
You may want to think about this for a moment,
If it's a very very old machine, you might need what's called the alternate install CD.
For the less old machines you can go ahead and get the normal desktop CD.
But if you really feel like this is a pre-2000-ish machine
and you still want to try to get Ubuntu on there,
you would be amazed at how well Ubuntu runs on these very very old machines.
But sometimes it is better to go out and get the alternate CD,
which has a few more options about installation,
which actually we will go into in this screencast.
So I'm going to get both actually.
But we'll start out with the normal installation.
So downloading this and burning it to CD is covered in previous screencasts.
Not necessarily Xubuntu, but the normal Ubuntu.
And so it's kind of something I won't cover here,
because there's a previous screencast about this.
One on burning it with Nero
and one on burning it on some other application out of Windows,
if you're switching over.
So I'll get out of that and I'm going to reboot the system,
so that we can go from a fresh boot with a whole new install.
So here we've rebooted the system and this is the first screen that you will see.
You've got a couple of different options there is the start or install Xubuntu
if you just want to try it out, if this is your first time trying out Ubuntu,
or if you're just curious about the XFCE desktop,
you can always run it off the CD.
It will obviously run a little bit slower than it would if it was on your hard drive,
because it is reading everything from a CD.
But it's a good way to experience the environment.
You can start Xubuntu in what's called the safe graphics mode,
which basically takes the lowest possible, catch all graphic mode,
so that no matter what screen you have, it will show you a graphic.
What I typically do is I just hit F4
and you can choose from the different displays from that menu that you're seeing now.
The one I've had the most success with is 800x600,
with, this is very important, 16 bit depth.
Sometimes, if you try something higher like a 24 bit depth
or certainly a higher resolution,
if your monitor is too old it just, it won't be recognized.
So that's what I typically do.
Having set that, I then start the disc.
Now if you want to not do this, if you change your mind
or if you've accidentally left the CD in the drive
and you just want to boot from your hard disk,
you can boot from the hard drive.
But we're going to start up off the CD, we've set our resolution,
so we hit that and it loads the Linux kernel
and it boots up the system a little bit something like this.
Now understand that on older spec machines
this CD is going to attempt to auto-detect the configuration
and one of the main things it needs to auto-detect,
especially on the older systems, is the monitor.
and what kind if graphic ability you've got.
So if you're not having a good result with the main CD,
then you might want to try the alternate CD,
because it's a lot easier of an install,
requires a lot less.
Well it's a harder install, but it requires less of your computer.
So this is the main XFCE desktop and this is running off the CD,
so it's a little bit slower than it would be.
But it's got the Thunar file manager, rather than Nautilus
or if you're coming from PC, the Windows Explorer.
And you can play around with it and explore what it does have.
And then once you've decided that you like what you see,
you can just click on the install.
And the default or main installer with Xubuntu is really quite friendly.
It's very graphical, easy to navigate through and it's almost self-explanatory.
So I'll kind of go through it quickly, the first screen.
And again you just have to keep in mind that since it's running off a CD
it's not touching the hard drive at all,
everything's being read just as fast as the CD can turn.
So it's not as fast as off of a hard drive.
So here's the list of your language that you want to install
Choose that from the menu and then you can choose your time zone
lots of different time zones for wherever you are.
I'll choose New York.
Now this is important because this is your keyboard,
so you can choose whatever keyboard you've got.
Now it's going to scan for hard drive and look at the hard drive.
Now the hard drive I'm installing this on to pretty much
is just a completely new hard drive.
I mean it's not new, but I wiped it clean of any kind of system.
And since it is an older machine it's a very small hard drive.
And I'm just going to go and use the whole drive.
and I think typically if you're doing Xubuntu,
that's probably what you're going to be doing,
because you're probably not running like Windows on the other partition.
you know, on the hard drive with any great success.
So you might as well... At least for me, when I'm doing this typically I just go ahead
and go for the whole hard drive and that makes it easy.
But if you need more information about about partitioning hard drives and things like that,
there is a separate screencast on that kind of stuff, so you can do that.
So now on this setup we are setting up the initial user.
The first thing it will ask you for is your name
and that'll the name you want the system to know you as.
The other name for your login is the actual login name.
you can choose a password, I just choosing some really basic stuff here,
because this is just a demo machine.
And now it's ready to install and it will give us a little summary.
So it's your chance to look over what you have chosen,
and make sure that's really what you want.
And up until now nothing has actually been written to the hard drive.
So you can still bail out.
But now I've hit install, so now it's starting to process the installation.
And it'll take a while even though it's a small hard drive.
You know, it's going to install a fair amount of software,
it's got to erase the drive first and all kinds of stuff
So I'm going to sort of fast forward us through this process.
And so far we've had really good luck with this.
So on really really old systems, this just might not work out for you.
But that does not mean that there's no hope
and in a short time we will do the alternate install.
And you'll see although you have to get in there and do a little bit of extra work,
it's actually not that hard, it's surprisingly easy in fact
and we'll do that.
Okay so through the magic of screencasting, I have advanced the installation process.
And it is here reminding us to go ahead and either restart or continue to use the CD.
If you're still playing around with the system
or you want to keep looking through it or something.
you can continue looking through the CD or using the CD rather
and when you've finished you can logout.
You'll want to make sure you eject this CD after you reboot or shutdown,
because otherwise your computer will boot off the CD again.
Okay the machine is now restarting.
Okay the machine has rebooted and it'll take a moment to get up to speed here.
But there we go, now it's started the graphic user interface
and it gives us the prompt to login.
So remember this is the name and password that we set during installation.
And assuming we know that information it will kick us into the desktop.
So this is the XFCE 4 desktop
Again it's pretty much what we saw before when we were working with the CD,
except no installation button.
But it should look fairly similar, it's got the usual file manager kind of setup,
it's called Thunar.
So that's where you'll find all of your data files that you create and save.
And then up in the upper left hand corner under the little XFCE window,
you've got all your system settings,
which are fairly similar to the normal Ubuntu system settings.
And there's a separate screencast on how to customize your computer, like the desktop
and how to get online and things like that.
So it's pretty simple and pretty well covered on other screencasts.
It's more of just an aesthetic thing when it comes down to where to find things.
I mean it's typically the same idea, there are different programs,
and all the main programs you need to do your hard work.
You know, there's multimedia programs to watch your movies.
There's a word processing program to do your office work, to write letters.
Just type in a quick note.
I don't think I'll save that one.
So it's a really robust system as you can see,
I mean it's got everything you typically need
and obviously you can always add more with the Synaptic Package Manager,
just like in Ubuntu.
And it's attractive and nice, you'll find that just because it is a simpler,
it just doesn't have really any fancy effects
it's not a very complex desktop system
and that just saves a lot of work for your main processor.
It doesn't demand as much out of your system RAM
and I think you'll be amazed.
I was really pleased that my very old computer that I had lying around
basically not being used, nothing was on it.
I threw Xubuntu on there and it runs really well.
So let's assume that you have a computer so old
that the normal install of Xubuntu did not work.
In that case, we will shut this down
and we'll boot up off the alternate installation disc.
So the first screen that you'll see is very much like the first one,
except that you've different options.
You've got the Install in Text Mode, you've got a text mode install for manufacturers.
So if you're building a system and you need to customize it, you can do that.
And then there's install a command line system, which you don't probably want to do.
I think by default the F4 setting is VGA,
which is the generic whatever monitor there happens to be,
as long as there's a monitor it will show you.
This is a very basic installer, it's not as pretty as the other one.
but believe me it's easy, it's not frightening at all
To navigate it's the up and down arrow,
hit return to accept something,
and the side arrows to select either the yes or the no and things like that.
So here it's just asking me to press a key on my keyboard,
so it can identify if I've got a keyboard hooked up to this computer.
And then it asks me if there are certain keys on my keyboard,
it's just trying to help me help it identify what keyboard I'm using,
what system I'm actually using.
And you just keep clicking through, I mean it's a really simple installer
it's just not as pretty as the other one,
but it's asking us basically the same information.
Again the right and left arrow for the yes and no,
return to accept.
So now it's detecting the hardware.
So it's looking for the CD-ROM drive first.
Found that.
It's loading some additional components for the installation.
And this is actually a fairly quick process itself.
There's a lot of auto-configuration that it can do.
I have this system plugged into a network by an Ethernet cable.
So it actually is, it's doing most of the configuration on it's own.
Right here it's asking to give the computer a name, basically.
It really, it's pretty arbitrary, you don't have to give it anything special.
Don't use spaces or any weird characters.
And again this is the partitioning portion of it
and again I think that for an Xubuntu system,
since you're probably doing it on an older machine,
you probably don't, you're probably not really going to be partitioning a disk.
You're probably doing this to resurrect a machine.
Not use Xubuntu in conjunction with another operating system.
At least that's how it's been in my case lately.
But if you do need to partition a fancier partitioning table,
you can watch one of the previous screencasts on partitioning
and that will explain all of that kind of stuff.
Timezone selection, choose your timezone.
This is the timezone selection you can choose whatever timezone you are in.
This is where we are setting up our username and the password.
So do this carefully, this is your username and your password,
so you want it to be good.
And this is the beginning of the installation,
this is what it will do for the next couple of minutes.
And I think I'm going to magically make this happen faster than it really would.
And now it's finished, magically.
And so I'm going to go ahead and press continue
It's finishing up, it's going to eject the disk for me
and I'll take that before I restart.
And once I've restarted my new login screen is this.
Now this may look a little bit scary to you because,
well there's no graphic interface yet.
And to get a graphic interface you typically would type startx.
But as you can see it can't start X yet because it doesn't know what X is.
Getting all these components is very easy, it's just text.
And you can certainly do this,
watch this screencast while you're setting up your system and it will be very easy.
The first you'll want to get is the desktop environment itself.
So you type in sudo apt-get install xfce4,
so that's sudo apt-get install xfce4
and that will attempt to download it from the repository.
Now the problem is right now that the repository that it thinks it needs is your CD-ROM.
But the CD-ROM that we obtained doesn't have the repository,
the information that we need on it.
So what can do is type in this code, which will change our directory
to a folder called /etc/apt.
We can go into apt and then we can type in this command
sudo pico source.list
and that takes us into a little text editor
It's very easy to understand, you just kind of arrow down about 4 lines.
and add a hash symbol or a pound symbol
right in front of this line that says CD-ROM.
And once you've done that there's not really anything else in here that needs to be done
everything else is okay.
Everything with a hash mark...
Everything with a hash symbol in front of it is a comment.
And those commands down at the bottom with all the highlighted letters,
those are the commands we can use in this little text editor.
So to save this, it's called write out.
So you hit the Ctrl key and the o key.
So as we said Ctrl + o
and that will ask us if we want to save it back to our disk.
And then you press return and then you hit Ctrl + x, to get out, to exit.
And now we can type in sudo apt-get xfce4.
And now that's looking online via my Ethernet cable and the Internet
for the XFCE desktop environment.
And it does it all for you, I mean it's just that simple.
So if you're not afraid to do a little bit of typing,
this process is fairly painless.
Ok so it's installed that, so now we're going to sudo apt-get install xorg.
It's xorg, all one word.
Ok, so once it's installed, it will bring up a configuration menu for us.
And up at the top are a very very high resolution
for really new monitors and new graphic cards.
And way down at the bottom are the ones we're probably looking at.
I happen to know this computer pretty well
and I know that the 1024x768 resolution is not going to happen on it.
The 800x600 I definitely know works.
640x480 I know works, I'm gonna hit the right arrow to get over to my Ok.
And I'll press Ok, return rather.
And now I need to set up some preferences in regards to our video display,
to really help this along.
So I'm going to change directory in to my /etc/X11 directory.
And that's actually a capital X.
And now I'm going to sudo pico xorg.conf
and now we are in this text editor again.
And again it's really easy to navigate through,
you just press the down arrow to go line by line
or ctrl + v to do sort of a page down kind of thing.
And what we're looking for is a section where it lists all the resolutions
and bit depths for our screen.
There's a lot of information in this file.
But the one we are really interested in right here is default depth.
See how it's in section Screen, it's identifying that as the default screen.
The default depth is 24, I've had a lot of problems with that in the past.
So I go ahead and set it to 16.
And that typically really insures that I get the graphic user interface,
the gui up and running quickly, because I just find that on older monitors,
a bit depth of 24 is just too much for it and it won't work.
So Ctrl+o to save that and Ctrl+x to get out of it
and I'm going to clear the screen.
And now if I hit startx this is the first thing I see
and this is our graphic user interface.
So as you can see it's a bit more dumbed down than what we got on the other CD.
But it's all very customizable.
and the first place to start is up here in the corner,
that's the bar that we can create into more of what it looked like on the other CD.
You can position it anywhere you like,
on a lot of XFCE desktops you'll find it right down at the bottom.
and you can do that.
You can set one up down at the bottom and one up at top, whatever you want.
And then if you right-click on the bar itself, you can start adding items to the panel.
So the first thing I'll add is that little XFCE menu that we had on the other one.
And that's a good place to be able to access all your applications and your settings,
so it's a handy one to have and you can move that around
and you can keep adding to it.
Another good thing to have on your panel is a clock.
That's always a nice feature, you can choose what kind of display you want,
you've got digital or more of a LED look or the analogue.
I prefer the digital and I like seconds to be ticking.
And actually I'm going to move this over,
so if you click on the move then you can drag it to where you want,
and click to release it.
And you can keep adding things.
Another nice thing to have on there are the pictures of all the screens that you've got,
because on Linux you can have multiple desktops.
You can view it in a little square, you can see it in a big row,
I find it kinda handy to see it in a row.
See what else we can add.
It's kind of handy to have a show desktop button,
because that way if you...
I'm going to go ahead and remove this little launcher there,
If you have a lot of programs open you can click on the desktop
and it just shows you the desktop.
And the task list is very handy because this will show you
all of the applications that you have open,
that you have minimized and things like that.
It's quite handy.
And again you can move everything, so I'm going to move this more to the left,
just because that is what I'm used to on Ubuntu systems.
And the other thing that I like to have in my panel is a trash.
Gotta have the trash.
And of course I don't want it there, I like it more on the end,
like on all the Ubuntu systems.
So I'll put it there.
And like I say you can make a top kicker.
And of course you can make a top panel
and customize it pretty much however you want.
You can change the background of the desktop,
And this again, it's got your little file manager in there.
It's got what they call Thunar, that will get you in to your home folder,
let you access all your data,
have a look around.
Right now this is a bare bones system, it doesn't really have a lot on it.
So what you'll want to do is you'll want exit the XFCE graphic environment
and you'll want to do a whole lot more sudo apt-getting
and as you can see in this menu right now,
basically all we've got are settings for the desktop
and that's not a whole lot.
So I'm going to quit out of it.
and what I would do is I would go here
and you could just sudo apt-get install any number of programs.
sudo apt-get install... for instance if you are doing word processing,
you're probably going to want a program called Abiword.
They're all free of course
and I think you'll be very pleased with their performance overall.
So this has been the Xubuntu installation screencast for lower spec machines.
I hope that you have found it very helpful.
I hope that you can resurrect that old computer that you've got sitting around.
Who knows what you'll be able to do with it, with Xubuntu on there.
You can find more screencasts at screencasts.ubuntu.com
And you can always request that we cover another topic,
again at screencasts.ubuntu.com
And you can even get involved and make your own at some point, if you feel up to it.
Either way thanks for joining me and I hope you've enjoyed it.