Microsoft Windows is not the only operating system that you can run on a computer. Linux, or more correctly GNU/Linux if you want to use its official name, is an Open Source operating system designed around several community tools and a backbone written by Linus Torvalds when he was a student in college.

Open Source does not particularly mean better or worse, it is simply a different development model where the code is available to everyone. More people are able to contribute, but with that comes more voices over which directions to take with the project. It has upsides and downsides.

Transcription of:
A Walkthrough Installing Ubuntu Linux

Hey, everyone, this is Will from beyourownit.com and I’m going to make good on a promise to some of our forum members from a couple of weeks ago. And they asked me, or I told them “What do you want to see for more content on the site?” And a bunch of them responded with “We’d like some Linux videos.”

And to most of the beginning PC repair or even some of the more experienced PC repair people, Linux is not really needed, it’s an enigma, they don’t really have time to experiment with it. But to those of us who are willing to take the time to learn a new operating system it can actually be quite advantageous. It’ll also teach you quite a bit about how Mac OS works as Mac OS is a Unix-based OS, but they share a lot of the same principles.

Anyhow, I am using Sun Virtual Box, which is now Oracle Virtual Box. And it’s not the most polished virtual machine ever, but it will do the job. I’m going to be using Ubuntu 10.0.4 for this demo.

And after you start the machine, it’s set to Boot from CD, with the live CD in there, it’s going to boot to this screen up here. And it will probably take a little bit longer than what it’s taking for me just because in a virtual machine your disk accesses pretty quickly.

Now, you can either Try or Install. Trying it brings you to the Live CD desktop.

The operating system is running off of the disk itself. Now, it’s running everything in memory, so if your computer does not have a lot of RAM this can be pretty slow. But you can come in here and play around and pretty much do just about everything, except for double click this guy, and you cannot do anything, really, to your computer.

You can do some formatting changes with the hard drive utilities. But overall, if you stay pretty limited to your software in here, you’ll be nice and safe. Anyhow, when you’re done playing with it or if you want to install, we’re going to double click this guy here. This is also the same screen that we would have came to if you had hit Install instead of Try.

It’s going to ask you your language and it’s going to run some little setup options here.

And if you noticed, with 10.0.4, they actually moved the close, minimize and maximize over to this side. After it does that, it’s going to ask you what time zone you’re in. So I am in Central, and Menominee is probably the closest one, maybe Chicago might be closer, but it really doesn’t matter. Just get your time zone right.

And most of us are going to be using the U.S.A. keyboard layout. You can actually click Guess and it will try to guess or if you know you have a different one you can put that in, too. It’s going to ask you “What do you want to do for your partitions?” You can move them around, there’s Erase and use, and sometimes it’ll say “Do you want to shrink all partitions?”

It’s really best to use it on either a separate partition that has already been made or a different hard disk because you can mess up boot loaders and what not, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be a little daunting to get them back. So anyhow, I’m going to erase this hard disk because it’s a virtual hard disk that has some other stuff on there.

My name is Will; I’m going to use Will to login.

Account password, I’m going to name this beyourownit1. And you can set it to login automatically, and that will actually encrypt your home folder and make a good attempt at keeping your data safe.

Go through here, it’s going to say all the changes that are happening. Install, and the installer will run and it’ll, you know, take the time and install everything.

OK, after that installation process finishes, and it will take a while, you’ll come up with this box here it says “Continue testing or restart now?” Continue testing leaves you in Live environment. Restart now will restart the installation; you can remove the CD-ROM and then boot to the actual hard disk install.

So now, that’s how you install Ubuntu Linux. The process is relatively the same on most of your other standard distributions. I mean, there is going to be some oddballs like Arch and Slackware that are going to make you get down and dirty with the command line and the text-based installer instead of the graphical one.

As far as other features that you can do, we’re going to go into what else you can do with Live CD at a later date.

This has been Will for Be Your Own IT. Thanks for watching this little tutorial on installing Ubuntu.

If you’d like to come visit us on the forums, it’s beyourownit.com/forum. You can request new videos, request new features on the site, get your questions answered. We have a full line of products for teaching yourself how to repair computers and starting your own business. Those are at beyourownit.com/store.

And we also have a Facebook page; you can follow us there, too. This has been Will for Be Your Own IT and thanks for watching.