Free and Easy with Ubuntu

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

March 23, 2005

According to its developers, Ubuntu is a ancient African word meaning 'humanity to others' and the spirit of this saying is what motivates them to work on this distribution that emphasizes the 'free as in freedom' philosophy of Linux. Their commitment to the end user can be seen on the projects homepage: www.ubuntulinux.org.

The stable release of Ubuntu is known as Warty Warthog, but for this review, I chose to download and install the Ubuntu 5.04-preview, known as Hoary Hedgehog, another lovely animal name. I obtained my copy of Hoary via Bittorrent and the ISO was here in no time, ready to be burned to CD.

Pre-Install

Being another distribution based on Debian, Ubuntu inherits a somewhat less polished install process. That means that you're going to be working with a standard text mode interface. If it were just the lack of polish that you have to deal with, there wouldn't be any problem but unfortunately, the process can be less than intuitive at times and requires a bit of concentration. However, the end result is worth the extra work at the beginning. At any rate, we'll walk you through the install here.

First, the installer will ask you to choose your language. For those of you that have been following this series of reviews, you know that I've mentioned that I like to have the user interface in English but I need to work with a Spanish keyboard, so I chose English here but then chose my location as Spain and the keyboard layout at Spanish. You can choose any combination that you want or need.

Next, it will try to configure your network connection with DCHP. I don't use this system on my home network where I work, so I needed to configure manually. In Ubuntu as in most other Linux distributions, this is pretty standard. First enter the IP address you assign the machine, then the gateway (which in my case is my ADSL router) and the DNS servers of your provider.

Now we come to the part that everybody dreads - carving up your hard disk like a pie - also known as partitioning. If you've read the previous installments of this series, you're aware that I am a fan of preparing a hard disk for two partitions: the root (/) partition where the operating system and everything else it needs to run is stored and /home, where we'll store users personal files. We always add to this what's known as a 'swap' partition which improves the machines memory capacity.

Though I found partitioning in Ubuntu to be somewhat confusing at first, I quickly got the hang of it. Before we actually go into it, I'll just point out that, if you want, you can choose the option to erase the entire disk and let Ubuntu use the whole hard disk. If you choose the slightly harder root of partitioning, you should now be seeing information about your hard disk. Ideally it, you should just be seeing free space, without any partitions. This will be our start off point.

From this free space we'll first create the root (/) partition. As I mentioned before, this will contain the operating system and everything it needs to run. For a typical modern desktop system, you should plan on a minimum of 3 GB, so keep this in mind at this step when you have to enter the size of the partition. Now, choose 'primary' for the type of partition.

Now you will see an options menu. The first option is 'usage method'. Select it and press enter. Now select 'format the partition' and push enter. Now you should be back to the main 'usage method' menu. Select the second choice: 'file system'. For modern Linux systems, I recommend 'ext3' or 'ReiserFS' which are known as 'journaling' filesystem. These file systems respond better to crashes than the classic 'ext2' Linux file system. (not that Linux is actually going to crash often, but you can have power outages for any number of reasons). Choose the file system you want and push enter. We're now back at the 'usage method' screen. This is where we choose the mount point of this partition. Linux systems 'mount' a hard disk for use when the machine boots. Mounting is just a way of preparing it for use. The mount point we need is ('/') - choose this and push enter. Again, we're back at the 'usage method' screen. You shouldn't need any mount options, which is the next item on the menu, so just jump down to option to select this partition as 'bootable: yes' (where the machine will find the operating system) and choose that. Lastly, if you're having second thoughts about the size of the partition you just created, you have a last chance to change it. If you're happy with what you have, then choose 'Done setting up the partition' and we're through with the first step.

The second step, which is to set up the /home partition, is basically a repeat of the set up of the root (/) partition. The only differences are, apart from the size of the partition, that you'll be choosing /home as the mount point and the bootable flag will be 'no'. Leave a little space, generally about double the size of your RAM memory, for a 'swap' partition.

When you're finished with /home, choose the remaining space for your 'swap' partition and select 'Use as swap area' from the main usage menu. Finally, choose: 'Finish partitioning and write changes to disk'.

Installation

After partitioning, Ubuntu proceeds to install the base system into the hard drive. The speed of this depends on the speed of your system. As soon as this is complete, it will ask you to remove the CD and let the computer reboot.

After rebooting, you will be welcomed to your new Ubuntu system. Now is the time to do a few configuration tasks.

First, you need to configure your time zone. Then you'll be asked to create a normal user account. You need to enter a real name (if you want), a user name and a password. Normally you would also choose a 'root' password. 'root' is the user that controls everything on a Linux system. This is the system administrator, so to speak. But Ubuntu uses the program 'sudu' to let the normal user work as root. We'll talk more about using 'sudu' shortly.

Now, it will ask you if you want to install additional software packages and updates via the 'apt' system. 'apt' is one of the best things about a Debian-based system. It easily fetches packages from the internet and installs them and makes sure that everything is managed correctly in the process. You're definitely going to want to say 'yes' to this. After you do, it will check the lists of servers with packages, known as 'sources.list'. This will make your maintenance tasks a breeze.

Post Install

Hoary (as we will call it from now on) comes with the brand-spanking new GNOME 2.10 desktop. One of the great improvements over past GNOME desktops that I have tried is that here there is full support for manipulating files on other machines via the file manager. When you start up this version of Ubuntu, you'll see icons on the desktop with the IP addresses of the systems that you can connect to.

Then you can easily connect to these systems and open files from them to edit on the system where you are. You can copy and move files back and forth seamlessly. This is something that I am used to doing with KDE's Konqueror and its 'fish' system, but these improvements in GNOME's file manager make it even easier to use than 'fish'.

Ubuntu is a GNOME based distribution, but if you've tried distributions that are based around KDE and you like that look and feel more, you can also have that too. The good people at the Kubuntu project are working on a version of Ubuntu with KDE (hence the name Kubuntu). If you install Hoary and you want KDE, all you have to do is fire up a terminal from the 'System Tools' menu and issue the command:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

Here's where we need to go back to something said earlier. We mentioned before that Ubuntu does its administration tasks via the program 'sudu', so if you want to fire up anything on the command line that requires 'root' privileges, then you'll need to place the command 'sudu' before it. Alternately, you can also open a 'root terminal' (also in the System Tools menu) and it asks for your password in a dialog box. At any rate, at the end of this process (this will download and install about 100MB of files), you'll have a shiniest and newest KDE, version 3.4, courtesy of the Kubuntu people. You'll see that it's a great looking desktop.

Ubuntu, just with its standard GNOME desktop is a fine system, but the newest KDE really makes it shine. Ubunto comes with all the programs you need to get productive work done: OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Evolution groupware/email client, Gaim IM client, plus various multimedia utilities and other tools. But when you add KDE on to it, you get a lot of interesting applications that really flesh out the user experience. One of these is the Akregator RSS feed manager that you can see below. This kind of program is a must-have if you're a devoted follower of blogs.

It also comes with all of the various KDE utilities that make your administration tasks easier. Here's a shot of a simple network management tool. For example, the task of placing the names of other machines in the /etc/hosts file is something that I've had to do by hand some other distributions I've tried. With the addition of KDE you get a tool to do it graphically:

This is, of course, just one example of many of the things that you can do.

If you find yourself needing any more software, you can go to the 'System' menu in GNOME and use the fine Synaptic tool to install new packages and keep the installed ones up-to-date.

Although I consider Ubuntu superior, it is not without a few problems worth mentioning. When I tried to use the excellent CD burning tool k3b, the system would not recognize my CD Burner on the test machine. Other distributions I had tried seemed to find it just fine. Also, the web browsing experience is not at 100% percent out of the box as it is with a distribution like MEPIS, which was the first distribution reviewed in this series. Luckily, it isn't difficult to get flash support. The first time you come across a website that needs the flash plugin, just click where it tells you to download and install it. It will work from there on. To get support for other media like RealVideo/Audio, you will have to go to Real's website and download and install on your own. This is understandable given that the aim of the Ubuntu project is to provide a distribution that's made up of free (as in freedom) software. I found this a minor inconvenience.

All in all, Ubuntu really shows how much of a user-friendly operating system Linux has become. If you can get beyond the somewhat more advanced pre-install with partitioning, Ubuntu's superior user experience more than makes up for it. And you can't beat the price! The Ubuntu project pledges that its system will always remain free, both in terms of free beer and in freedom to use as you see fit.

Michael J. Jordan is the webmaster of Linux Online. He can be reached at Michael.Jordan**AT**Linux.org