The “Break it Down” Blog

Introduction

The purpose of this post is to give folks that have never used Ubuntu (or even Linux) and idea of what Ubuntu is all about. The reason for putting this together is that most of the existing reviews online are exactly that: reviews. While certainly helpful for existing Linux users it doesn’t give folks who have never tried Linux (or even Mac) before a good introduction to this crazy new thing called “Ubuntu”. There are concepts in Ubuntu that don’t exist in some other Linux distrobutions especially if the last time you tried Linux was back in the day of hunting through rpmfind.net digging for your exact build of the RPM you needed in order to get Wine to run Half-Life 1.

Intended Audience

Non-linux users or users fairly unfarmiliar with Linux. If you run Ubuntu, Fedora Core 5, Gentoo or SUSE and understand the ins and outs of Linux, skip ths guide. It will just be a review of all the stuff you already know.

If you are primarily a Windows users or even a Mac user and you are sick of hearing about all this Linux craze, especially “Ubuntu”, and want to try it out but don’t really feel comforatable with the process OR you started to run the installer, freaked out and turned it off, then keep reading.

What’s with the names? What about versions?

Some of you might have heard about the silly Ubuntu release names like “Breezey Badger” or “Dapper Drake” when a person is referring to a release of Ubuntu, e.g. “I installed Dapper Drake, it’s awesome!”. Each release of Ubuntu has a version associated with it (e.g. 5.04, 6.06, etc.) that is actually tied to the date of the release. In addition to the version number, the Ubuntu team gives the releases friendly/silly names that people sometimes use to refer to a specific version. The releases so far have been:

• WartyWarthog (4.10; Released October 20, 2004)
• HoaryHedgehog (5.04; Released April 8, 2005)
• BreezyBadger (5.10; Released October 13, 2005)
• DapperDrake - (6.06 LTS; Released June 1, 2006)

The next release of Ubuntu will be Edgy Eft.

Where is the installer or install disk?

There is no specific install disk for Ubuntu as has typically been the case with most Linux distrobutions. The installer is actually part of what is called the Live CD. The idea of the Live CD is to provide a fully bootable/usable version of the operating system on a CD that you can burn and boot on your computer. As you are using Ubuntu, if you decide you like it, you can simply double click the link Install link on the desktop and then start stepping through the installer. It’s a very nice and friendly approach. If you decide you don’t like Ubuntu, just reboot your computer and take the disk out of the drive, all gone!

No-Commitment Test-drive of Ubuntu (Live CD)

This is where Ubuntu shines. You can actually download, burn and boot a CD containing Ubuntu on it on your computer with absolutely no change to your computer at all. The entire OS runs off of the CD. While that means it runs fairly slow, it does give you a fully functioning Ubuntu system to try out. The quickest way to get started here is to go to the Ubuntu site, click the Desktop-download link, select your mirror, then select the version of Ubuntu you want to download. 95% of people are going to want to grab the PC (Intel x86) desktop CD under the Desktop CD section:

* NOTE: Even if you have an AMD or Intel 64-bit system, I would still encourage you to download and use the 32-bit version of the Desktop install. The reason for this is that there are some proprietary drivers, codecs or other files that are not offered on the 64-bit build of any Linux operating system yet that can make configuring Ubuntu to do things as simple as play Flash movies from YouTube impossible or a huge pain in the butt. I also encountered some stability issues with the 64-bit build and chalk that up to the fact that it is tested less than the 32-bit build which makes up the majority of downloads and installs of Ubuntu.

Installation

If you decide you want to install Ubuntu after booting the Live CD up, go ahead and click the Install link off of the desktop. This will fire up the Ubuntu installer and will start walking you through it. Most all of the installation is self explanitory except for the Partitioning step.

* NOTE: If you plan to make space on your existing Windows drive to install Ubuntu, be sure to defragment your hard drive first. You can do this by booting into Windows (I prefer in Safe Mode, but it takes 10x longer to run, so do it over night) and then running Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Defragment

* NOTE: The follow section explains in more detail the idea of partitions and mount points. It’s not necessary to read, just scroll to the next notation to skip this section.

For users new to Linux the idea of ‘partitioning’ may seem odd. The reason for that is Windows has historically only created one disk partition when it installs and it does this by default, so all you have ever usually needed to do when installing Windows is to select the hard drive you wanted to install Windows to, not specify the partitions or god forbit mount points.

Partitions and mount points are related. Mount points represent well-know portions of every Linux system like your root “/”, or your home dir “/home” or your boot dir “/boot” or your user dir “/usr” and so on. Every single Linux system needs atleast one mount point specified (root) and one partition specified to be the swap partition. On Windows the swap ‘partition’ is really just a swap file, and is kept at the root of your drive as a hidden file. On Linux this ‘file’ actually needs it’s own partition with a specific filesystem type of ‘Linux Swap’.

It’s important to mention that mount points all map to partitions. So for example, let’s say you wanted to make your boot mount point (/boot) only 100MB and your user mount point (/usr) 40GB. You would need to create individual partitions for these mount points, specifying later on during the install which mount point mapped to which partition. I would say this approach is for more advanced or anal users that like to keep everything nicely specified or insulate individual partitions from eachother. For example, when you reinstall Ubuntu you can tell it which mount points map to which partitions AND you can specify which partitions need to get reformatted. Let’s say you decided to make your home dir (/home) 20GB and it’s own partition. So next time you reformatted and reinstalled Linux, you could re-specify that your 20GB partition is your /home mount point, but tell Ubuntu to NOT format the partition, so after the system was finish installing, your home dir would still be there but untouched; with all your files, configuration information and so on all intact. This is sort of the equivalent of reinstalling Windows completely with a clean wipe of your system but telling it “Leave the My Documents folder alone”. On Windows this is impossible because it only uses one partition and it can’t avoid formatting a portion of the partition. On Linux, we have this added level of complexity, but you start to see some of the cool things you can do with that complexity.

More Info: mout points, partitions

* NOTE: End of partition and mount point explanation.
For the sake of this guide forget all that. Since directories are hierarchical simply creating a huge partition for root (/) and then one partition for swap is enough and is what I usually do. In the past I used to be really gung-ho about creating separate partitions for every mount point, but a few times I ended up filling up a partition that I had specified too small (like creating a 2GB home partition) and there was no easy way to increase the size, so I ended up reformatting.

Partitioning

* NOTE : Repartitioning an existing drive always runs the risk of killing the information on the drive. Be sure to back up any important information from your Windows install if you decide to repartition an existing hard drive. I would suggest you run under the assumption that your Windows installation will be toasted, if you are OK with that, then proceed. If that prospect scares you to death, I would HIGHLY suggest you stop tinkering with things like disk partitioners now as it may occur then you might get caught in a tricky situation (unless you have a lot of super technical friends to help out).

Now the trick here is to partition your disk to either create room for your new Ubuntu install along side your Windows install on the same hard drive, or to reformat a free hard drive to fit Ubuntu on it. Either way you will be using a nice graphical partitioning tool called GParted. GParted is a slick graphical partitioning tool that can be used to resize your disk partitions for any purpose, not just Linux installations. If you ever need a graphical partitioning tool and don’t want to buy Partition Magic, you can grab a handy Live CD with GParted on it for the purpose of booting just to resize a disk. You can even grab a Live USB image as well to boot from a USB device. To get an idea of what you will see, here are some generic screenshots of GParted from the site:

* NOTE: Just a reminder, at this step of the install you are not specifying mount points like /home or /usr yet, you are just specifying the partitions (or portions of hard drive) that you want to exist.

Across the top of the tool is your entire hard drive, shown as a bar. The individual blocks represent the partitions on the hard drive. If you are viewing a Windows disk for the first time, this entire block will be a solid rectangle indicating that your disk isn’t broken up into multiple partitions. Also notice the yellow portions of each block, this indicates the amount of data or how full the partition is. This can help you visualize how much room you can chop off of your Windows partition. For example, if your Windows partition is practically full, then you probably can’t chop off enough for Linux and you need to boot back into Windows and start clearing data. Or if you have a ton of white space and very little yellow, you can probably spare much more room for Linux.

* NOTE: Some users with laptops or pre-assembled machines may be surprised to see a small partition at the beginning of their hard drive. This is a common practice by some manufacturers to store system restore information on in the case of a complete computer failure and need to wipe and reinstall the system. Unless you plan on totally wiping your system to replace Windows with Linux, do not touch this partition; just leave it the way it is. We will carve out the space we need from the huge Windows partition to the right of it.

Deciding on Partition Sizes

Now what you need to do is select the big block representing your Windows partition and either right click and select Resize or select the block by clicking on it and then go to Partition then select Resize. Now you need to figure out how much space you want to chop off your Windows drive to sacrifice for Ubuntu. I would suggest 40GB if you can spare it, if you can’t, 20GB will do. I’m sure it’s possible to get a basic install of Ubuntu running with less, but if you plan to use this install at all like a real desktop try and use atleast 20. If you just wanted to install it to mess around, then I think 10GB might work fine. Keep in mind it’s not that the install disk is going to cough up 10GB worth of data onto your disk, I’m just trying to account for any and all applications you might start downloading and installing. For example on my install that is 3 weeks old that I’ve been using full time for some movies, Java development and some graphic work, I’m at 22GB disk usage out of my 80GB partition:

After you have resized your Windows partition, you should have some gray space marked as Unallocated. This is the portion of the disk we need to chop into 2 parts: swap space and the rest for your root (/) mount point.

Right click on the gray area of the disk and select New. This new popup looks pretty confusing, the parts you need to pay attention to are indicated as so:

• Free Space Preceding: The amount of room you want to put before the current partition, the default here is fine and will most likely be 0 so your new partition butts up against our previous one.
• New Size: This is the size of the partition you are creating. In our case, Swap is about 1GB and root (/) will be the remainder. The default behavior here is to set this value to the remaining contiguous space on the disk, for swap we will adjust this to 1000, but when creating root, we’ll leave it alone since we do want all the remaining space on the disk to make up our root (/) partition.
• Free Space Following: The amount of free space to place after the partition, leave this alone. The tool should adjust this amount depending on what you type into the New Size field.
• Create as: Every hard drive can have up to 4 primary partitions. I have no idea why, but that’s the rule. So on most computers you will end up with 3 after we are done: 1 Windows, 1 Swap, 1 root (/). On some machines, like the ones I mention above that have a special partition at the front of the disk for restore information, you will have exactly 4. If you decide you want to create all the mount points for your Linux install (/, /usr, /home, /boot, etc. etc.) you will need to create what is called an Extended Partition, and then inside of that, create all your individual partitions. We don’t cover that here.
• Filesystem: The type of filesystem that this partition will be formatted with. On Windows this is either FAT32 or NTFS. On Linux you have a ton of choices. The most common about 5 years ago was ext2, that got upgraded with ext3 which I believe is the preferred safe default for most everything. Some people, including me, like to use ReiserFS because it offers improved performance when handling tons of small files. The difference used to be more noticable back in the day between ext2 and ReiserFS but I honestly can’t tell anymore. So using ext3 is probably the safe/common way to go but Ubuntu might default you to ReiserFS which is fine too. For our swap partition we will need to specify the special type of Linux Swap.

Now go ahead and create your two partitions. The first one as I mentioned above with be 1GB (1000MB) with a type of Linux Swap. Then the second one will be the remaining disk space with a type of either ext3 or ReiserFS. Be sure to write down the partition name for the partitions you have like /dev/hda1 or /dev/sda1 and so on, we will need this on the next screen. After that click through to let Ubuntu finish partition the drive.

You will then get prompted with a screen that shows you your partitions then the associated mount point and lastly a checkbox indicating if it should be formatted or not. The defaults on this screen are usually correct for me, the only thing to check for is that your Windows partition(s), usually /dev/sda1, is not checked to be reformatted. The only two partitions that need to be reformatted are your swap and root (/) partitions. That is why I had you write down the paths before, so you can compare the two on this screen to make sure they are marked correctly as swap and root (/). If they are hit next, the disk will be formatted and the install will run and finish then reboot.

Understanding the Desktop for the First Time

After the first time you bootup and login, you will be at the default Ubuntu desktop (for those that care, Ubuntu uses Gnome as the default desktop, Kubuntu uses KDE). Your desktop will look something like this:

I’ve tried to annotate everything that can be related to a typical Windows install with “Similar To” and “Same As” notation. But ignoring that fact, you should be able to look at my desktop and say “Hey that looks pretty easy to get around”. Of course the brown and orange are just the default color schemes, you can change that to whatever you want. In fact here is an excellently detailed guide on how to do exactly that.

Understanding Repositories

Here are some getting started quick tips just to file away in your brain:

• Ubuntu Linux is based on the Debian Linux distrobution. Is that important? Probably not.
• Because Linux is all about open source and free software, it allows communities/software developers and users to put together these HUGE repositories of software that can be accessed using nice front end GUIs to install software from. These are called Repositories
• There is no equatable concept of Repositories in Windows because it’s a commercial operating system. Of course there is free Windows software out there, there just isn’t enough of it to have ever justified Microsoft or anyone else to put together enormous repositories of all the free software… there are also licensing laws and distrobution problems with that in the Windows world. Linux and open source is very friendly to the idea of redistrobution which makes this concept work.
• Because of these Repositories, whenever you are looking for software like a browser, movie player, office applications, email client, game, chat client, web cam recorder, library, development tools or anything else, chances are it’s already in one of these repositories and you can install it with a few clicks and let the software handle all the dependencies necessary to install it.
• All your repositories can be managed through a simple Software Properties UI interface to adjust what repositories your computer is aware of:
  
• There are 4 different classifications used to identify repositories (Read more here):

• Main (officially supported software)
• Restricted (supported software that is not available under a completely free license)
• Universe (community-maintained, i.e. not officially supported software)
• Multiverse (software that is “not free”)

I typically find it a good idea to add all 4 types of all 4 of the main repositories that ship with Ubuntu so that way any time you search for software to install, chances are you’ll find it. See below, some utilities will turn all our repositories on for us without us needing to worry about it.

First Things First

Before you continue there is something you need to be aware of. A lot of things you may take for granted on Windows for working right away like playing movies off of YouTube (using Flash) and watching any kind of movie in your browser like trailers at Apple’s Trailer site, GameSpot video reviews, or Street Fire videos require some work on Linux. Getting these things working is a combination of:

• The right video player
• The right audio and video codecs to play the media
• The right browser plugins so you can watch it inside your browser

If you try and do this by hand or by hunting through the forums you will be met with defeat after days of trying to get this to work. This was one of the biggest reasons switching to Ubuntu didn’t work for me the 1st time I tried it, this stuff was a nightmare.

Luckily for us this is a problem for lots of folks and two fantastic projects have sprung up to combat this problem. 1 is called EasyUbuntu and the other is called Automatix.

I’ve used both of these resources. I found EasyUbuntu to get me 95% of where I wanted to be with a nice/safe interface. Automatix is a little less friendly and somehow got some of my video packages into a state where I can no longer maintain them manually, but it did also install the last few “restricted/illegal in the US due to licensing” codecs in order for me to be able to watch all my video content, even embedded movies on the GameSpot video pages which seemed unatainable.

I would suggest running EasyUbuntu first, checking everything you need and want then running Automatix to add the restricted video drivers if you have a license for the codec (in the US) or live outside the US. Then you should be able to watch everything. I believe both packages will also modify your repositories to add all the necessary repositories for you. I know Automatix will temporarily change your repository list in order to pull down some of the more restricted files and then restore it. If you are worried about permanently having “non standard” repositories in your repository list, don’t let either program change it and instead open up the Software Properties dialog I referred to above, remove ALL the default repositories until the list is empty, then click Add and add each repository, being sure to click the check mark next to all 4 types for each one. That should give you 4 listings in the box with all 4 types of repository shown. Don’t forget to run a refresh after this to sync up with them.

Installing Software

There are two ways to install software in Ubuntu. The super-freaking-easy (Add/Remove) way and the little-more-advanced (Synaptic) way. When I can, I prefer to use the super easy way, and that is done by the Add/Remove program dialog seen here:

All you do is select the piece of software you want and hit the check box next to it then click Apply (you can select multiple pieces of software than apply them all at once). Notice the two check boxes allowing you to filter out unsupported or commercial applications? I usually keep these checked so I can always find what I’m looking for and then optionally decide if I want to install it after that as opposed to just not finding it.

* NOTE: Any software you install from this menu will create friendly shortcut entries in your Applications menu and/or System menu if installed, so you don’t need to worry about hunting down the software after the fact to create quick launch links for it.
Now this easy way of installing software does not work for codecs or libraries, only applications. So if you need to install a codec or library or something and need to use the advanced method, the way you do that is launch Ubuntu’s package management program named Synaptic (Add/Remove is actually a super-trimmed down version of Synaptic). You can launch Synaptic by doing the following:

I don’t want to go over the details of how to use Synaptic but rest assured it’s very straight forward. A typical session would include searching for some package name or description like “AAC” (if you need AAC audio support for playing music off your iPod), and then right clicking on the package you need and choosing to Mark for Installation. Synaptic will notify you whenever a package has dependencies that it needs to add to the installation group as well and any conflicts that arise from the installation. After you finish selecting everything you need, you can hit the Apply button to install everything. Be sure to click Reload each time you start Synaptic so your package definition lists are up to date with the most recent copies of everything out there.

Staying Up to Date

One of the nicest touches in Ubuntu is the integrated update manager that notifies you when there are updates available for your system. This is very similar to the Windows Update messages except remember our conversation above about repositories? These updates, instead of just being drivers or Microsoft software, typically apply to every piece of software on your computer since most all of it came from a repository. This is one of the slickest parts of Ubuntu as the update manager not only notifies you of updates, it also applies them and then additionally provides information after the fact letting you know if you should restart a certain program or even your computer. Have a look:

Keeping your system and all your software up to date is totally painless. For manually installed software that you did from the command line, I’m going to assume you are savvy enough to know how to keep it up to date, or atleast install updated versions from time to time.

Conclusion

I hope this general Ubuntu started guide has proven to be helpful to any non-Linux users that aren’t sure about Linux yet but want to give it a try. If you’d like more information about more advanced topics like getting your iPod working and what using Ubuntu Linux as a primary desktop is like for a week along with all the quirks I discovered and solutions (at the end). (Digg this)
Resources

The following are links you should have in your browser:

• Ubuntu Guide: Huge wiki-style page with tips for almost everything on Ubuntu.
• Ubuntu Official Wiki: The official wiki of Ubuntu linux.
• Ubuntu Official Forums: The official Ubuntu forums.
• EasyUbuntu: Fantastic utility you can use to immediately setup all the ‘restricted formats’ on Ubuntu. Basically make stuff work right off the bat, no digging through Wiki entries or forums.
• Automatix: Another utility similar to EasyUbuntu. It offers more options of restricted things to install but has a less intuitive interface and in my experience as well as others is easier to screw up installed packages with.