Installing & Using Ubuntu Server 6.10, Edgy: Simple and Easy

Introduction:

As I have noted in my previous articles, Ubuntu has been created with one objective in mind. Make Linux operating system easy to use to non-geeks and bring Linux into main stream computer operating systems. I believe that Ubuntu is helping Linux in heading in the right direction. It is still rough at the edges, but that will be taken care of in the near future. I am sure.

Installation:

Ubuntu has simplified the installation process by taking away most of the decision making steps / places out of users hands and making those decisions itself by taking an average of the requirements of the users. To talk in terms of software development, Ubuntu has become more abstract in its installation. It just asks the users what should be installed at the high level and how it should be installed. By that I mean that now the user does not have to know what all components make a working Openoffice.org installation. It just asks the user whether to install the Openoffice.org or not. It makes the rest of the decision itself because it knows at a minimum what should be installed to make software work. Users who need uninstalled functionalities can always go and customise the package later on.

On booting your machine with the Ubuntu 6.10 CD and you are presented with the first screen which gives you options to install the system. I was a bit surprised at first to see that the option to install LAMP server was missing. But hold on and read on. Select the first option and press Enter.

The second screen is a simple language selection screen. Select English (or your preferred language and press Enter to select. On the next screen Ubuntu intuitively detects your probable location from your language selection and selects it.

Choose a new location if it is incorrect and press Enter to proceed to the next screen.

Don't press enter on the next screen. Move the cursor to highlight NO and then press enter. The next screen is keyboard layout selection. By default in most of the installation I have seen; both Windows and Linux, the most common keyboard layout (US English) is already selected so you could just press enter on this screen. Not in Ubuntu though.

Here on pressing enter while Yes is selected takes you through a keyboard selection process where it asks you to press certain keys on your keyboard to detect the layout. I wonder why it does that. It should also detect the keyboard layout intutively from the language and location selection. Don't you think so? Anyway, we certainly don't want to do that. We just want to select the layout from a list of choices. So highlight No by pressing the TAB key and press Enter to move to the next screen.

Curiously here on this screen the layout selected by default is U.S. English. Select a different one based on your location and language and press Enter to proceed to the next screen. You thought just selecting the keyboard would be good enough in most cases, didn't you. Well I thought so too. But no, Ubuntu gives you even more granularity in selecting the keyboard layout.

I would recommend that you not spend much time on this and just select the default layout and proceed to the next screen where it starts detecting hardware.

Once the hardware is detected Ubuntu starts the network detection. If you have DHCP on your network, Ubuntu detects it and configures the network adapter.

On the next screen assign a name to your server and press enter to continue.

Once that is done, the next step to partition your disks and allocate space. In most cases, the default settings are good enough. However, if you are making a multi-boot computer, then you might want to review the disk partitioning and reassign the disk spaces accordingly. Having said that, I would recommend not changing the SWAP space that the system has set. You can change the root partition if you want.

Select the time zone you are in once the partitioning is done and move on to the next screen. As we know that Ubuntu disables root access by design. In the next two screens configure the user name and user account that will be the first user of the system.

You can always add users later on once the installation is done.

Once the user information is done, Ubuntu installation starts and it installs the base system. After completing the base system installation, Ubuntu asks you to install add-ons.

In Edgy, Ubuntu has moved the installation of LAMP server here and at this points it also allows you to install DNS server on your machine. Just select the appropriate options and press Enter to proceed. That's it.

The Ubuntu installer finishes the installation and the next screen shows the success message. Remove the CDand your machine will reboot and start Ubuntu server.

Post installation tasks:

Once the server boots, I recommend that you update your system to get the latest patches and updates from the internet by running the following command in su:

apt-get update

One thing you would want to know is that the Ubuntu server starts by default in the text mode. It does not install the X server. So whatever you want to do you will have to use command line. Or you can install the desktop component by running the following command in su.

apt-get install ubuntu-desktop.

Caution: The installation is around 1.5 Gb. So don't do it unless you have a broadband connection and don't plan to do any real work on the system.

Conclusion:

I have found Ubuntu 6.10 to be quite solid system and easy to use. The only thing that I think it is missing is the Long term support (LTS) which Ubuntu 6.06 currently enjoys. I am not sure I know the reason behind it so I will just leave it at that.