Table of Contents for

Ubuntu: Up and Running

The first thing to do is visit http://www.virtualbox.org and download the program using the Downloads link, located in the lefthand panel of the web page. Then, choose the version to download from the choices of Windows, Intel Macs, Linux, or Solaris. For example, as I write this, the Windows version is 3.1.4 and is 71 MB in size.

Once you have downloaded the file, you should run it to bring up the installer, as shown in Figure 2-14.

Figure 2-14. Installing VirtualBox

Click Next, and then agree to the license before clicking Next again. After that you can choose the support and networking features you want. If in doubt, just click Next to continue using the defaults. Then click Next one more time, followed by clicking Yes and then Install to start the installation.

A window with a progress bar will appear to keep you up-to-date on the installation. When finished, click the Finish button. After that, the program will run, presenting the window shown in Figure 2-15.

Figure 2-15. The VirtualBox main screen

You are now ready to create a virtual machine, so click the New icon at the top left. Then, when the New Virtual Machine Wizard window opens, click Next to bring up the window shown in Figure 2-16.

For name, enter the name of the operating system, such as Ubuntu 9.10, and then select Linux for the operating system. The version of Linux will then default to Ubuntu, which is what you want, so click Next to get to the Memory screen (see Figure 2-17).

I recommend you accept the default of 384 MB shown here. However, if you have plenty of memory (say, 2 GB or more), you could increase that to 1000 MB or thereabouts. Then click Next to move on to the hard disk screen shown in Figure 2-18.

Ensure that “Boot Hard Disk” and “Create new hard disk” are both checked, and then click Next, then Next again on the following screen, to get to the Hard Disk Storage Type screen (see Figure 2-19).

Figure 2-16. Creating a virtual machine

Figure 2-17. Setting the virtual machine’s base memory size

Figure 2-18. Creating a virtual hard disk

Figure 2-19. Selecting Dynamically expanding storage

Here, I recommended you select the “Dynamically expanding storage” option, and then click Next. The reason for this is that you don’t actually need to create a large hard disk in VirtualBox, because it has the ability to increase a hard disk’s size as necessary. The only downside to this is that the upper limit to how large it can grow is your physical hard disk’s size. If you think you will be using a lot of disk space in your virtual machine and this may impinge on the space you need for your original operating system, you may wish to choose “Fixed-size storage” instead. This will ensure that the virtual hard disk will never grow any larger than a set size.

On the next screen (see Figure 2-20), you get to choose the virtual hard disk’s starting size (or exact size if you chose “Fixed-size storage”).

Figure 2-20. Choosing the maximum virtual hard disk size

Here, you can also choose the location and filename for this disc, which by default will have the same name as the virtual machine. Click Next when you are done, and then click Finish to complete the creation of the virtual hard disk. If you enter a location and filename that is already in use, you will receive an error message and should enter a different one instead.

Otherwise, click the Finish button that will be displayed on the summary screen that appears. Your virtual machine will now be created and ready to use (but powered off), as shown in Figure 2-21.

Figure 2-21. The virtual machine Ubuntu 9.10 is now created

To start up your new virtual machine, double-click its icon in the lefthand pane. The first time you do this, it will call up the First Run Wizard (see Figure 2-22).

Click the Next button to start the wizard and bring up the screen shown in Figure 2-23, where you have the opportunity to choose to install an operating system on the virtual machine from either the optical drive or an ISO file.

If you click Next at this point (while Host Drive is selected), the CD or DVD in the drive will be used as the installation media.

Alternatively, you can choose an ISO file to boot from by selecting the Image File option. You must then click the Browse button, locate the required file, and click the Add button at the top left of the next screen (see Figure 2-24).

Here, you can see I have added the image file ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso. Once you have added an ISO file, click the Select button to return to the previous media selection screen, and then click Next, followed by Finish to commence the installation process.

The familiar Ubuntu startup screen shown earlier in Figure 2-1 will then be displayed, waiting for you to select a language.

Figure 2-22. The First Run Wizard

Figure 2-23. Selecting the installation media

Figure 2-24. Adding a disc ISO image

From here onward, you can consider the new “machine” to be a complete PC in its own right, and you can either run the ISO or disc in Live mode or go right ahead and install the operating system. I recommend the latter because you can then power up the virtual machine any time you like and start up where you left off work before.

There’s more information on using VirtualBox in Chapter 3.

To perform the installation, as it will not run directly from the DVD, drag and drop the following two files from the distros folder of the DVD onto your Windows desktop:

Once they are on your desktop, remove the DVD from the drive (this is important; if you leave the disc in the drive, Wubi will not run correctly), and double-click wubi.exe to commence installation.

There are a number of things to consider when using Wubi, as follows:

Once the program is running, the next screen you’ll see will be the one shown in Figure 2-25.

Figure 2-25. The Wubi installation screen

From this screen, you can choose the drive to which Ubuntu should be installed, the language to use, the size of virtual hard disk to create, and your Ubuntu username and password.

I recommend you keep the installation size large enough to make it unlikely for you to run out of room. The default is usually 17 GB, but if you have a 100 or more gigabytes of free space, you may wish to change this to the maximum of 30 GB.

It is important to choose both a username and a password, even though Wubi will let you continue without entering a password, because I have encountered a number of difficulties using Ubuntu/Wubi without one. To ensure you enter it correctly, you must type in the password twice.

If your computer will contain private information, I suggest you choose a difficult-to-guess password, possibly consisting of both uppercase and lowercase letters as well as numerals and punctuation. But make sure that you can remember whatever password you choose. I discuss the creation of good passwords in Chapter 9.

The installation process will then begin, continuously showing you how far the installation has progressed. Typically, for any fairly recent PC, the initial installation should take less than 10 minutes (see Figure 2-26).

Figure 2-26. Installation should be fairly fast

If Wubi detects any problems with the disc, it may try to download the ISO over the Internet. If this happens, it is usually because the ISO you copied to the desktop is corrupted. To prevent this from happening, you can first check the MD5 hash for a file, as described in the section About the MD5 Hashes, to ensure that it’s a true copy of the original.

When installation is complete, you will see the window shown in Figure 2-27. If you are ready to start using Ubuntu now, select “Reboot now.” Otherwise, select “I want to manually reboot later” if you have work that needs saving. Either way, click Finish to end the installation.

Figure 2-27. Ubuntu has been installed and just awaits a reboot

Whenever you reboot from now onward, Ubuntu will be displayed as a selectable operating system alongside your usual Windows OS. The first time you start Ubuntu, it will spend a few minutes performing some additional installation functions and will then reboot when it has finished.

If you wish, the next time you load Windows you can delete the two files that you copied to your Windows desktop.

You are now ready to move on to Chapter 3 to continue your exploration of Ubuntu, although I recommend you complete this chapter first, since there’s a lot of useful information in the following sections.

If you decide to install Ubuntu alongside an existing operating system, after choosing the sizes that each will have, click Forward. The dialog in Figure 2-33 will display to remind you that what you plan to do is irrevocable. It will also tell you that the resizing operation might take a long time.

Figure 2-33. This dialog reminds you that there’s no going back

When you click Continue, one or more windows will pop up explaining what’s going on until the installation process eventually gets to the screen shown later in Figure 2-34.

If you choose to have the Ubuntu installation take up the entire hard disk, partitioning will be very quick because there will be no data to move about during a resize operation. So, a few seconds after you click the Forward button, the user information screen should be displayed.

The next screen to be displayed asks you to enter your user details, such as your name, username, password, and computer name (see Figure 2-34).

Here, you should enter your name, which could be your full name, just your first or last name, or whatever you prefer. You can use uppercase characters if you like. Your username will then be created for you based on the name you give, but it will be set to all lowercase.

You can change the username if you wish, as long as you keep it to lowercase letters and numbers. However, I don’t recommend doing so, because it could then be confusing to tell which user has what username, especially on a system with several users.

Figure 2-34. The user details installation screen

You must then choose a password for your computer (without setting a password, you will not be able to progress to the next screen). If you will have sensitive data in your account, I recommend that you create a strong password comprising both uppercase and lowercase letters, as well as numbers and punctuation; just make sure you can remember it. You will have to type the password in twice to ensure you didn’t make a typo.

If you choose a password that Ubuntu considers weak, it will tell you so and offer to let you choose a different one, or you can confirm that you do want the one you chose.

For computer names, I generally choose to combine the username, the operating system name, and the computer model. That way, it’s easy to see exactly which computer is what over a network, and it’s especially useful when building dual- and multi-boot systems with different operating systems. In this case, I ended up with a computer name of robin-ubuntu-iq500 for the installation, although you can enter any name you like here.

Finally, on this screen, you can decide whether to have Ubuntu log you in automatically. If you won’t have any sensitive data on the computer and are not concerned about other people using it, then go ahead.

But generally I would recommend you choose the second option to require a password. If someone else wants to use the computer, you can simply create a new account. That way you never have to think about it again. To be ultra secure, you can require a password to be used both for logging in and to decrypt the contents of your home folder.

Once you have filled in all the details, click the Forward button to continue to the final summary screen, which will look like Figure 2-35.

Figure 2-35. The final installation screen provides a summary

If everything looks correct, click the Install button to commence the installation process, which should proceed uninterrupted—so now’s the time to go and make a pot of coffee.

Once installation is complete, a window will pop up asking you to click the Restart Now button. If you ran the installer from the Live DVD, you’ll also see a Continue Testing button (see Figure 2-36). So go ahead, remove the DVD from the drive, and prepare to enjoy your new operating system by clicking Restart Now.

Figure 2-36. Ubuntu is now installed

If you have installed Ubuntu as the computer’s only operating system, rebooting will display a couple of lines of text that will quickly disappear, to be replaced with the official Ubuntu logo, followed by the Ubuntu login screen.

On dual- or multi-boot computers, you will be offered a choice each time your computer boots up. This will vary according to the operating systems installed, but will look something like Figure 2-37.

Figure 2-37. Selecting an operating system to start up

In this case, there are two installations of Ubuntu. The first entry shown is one of them, and the fifth entry is the other.

Dual- and multi-boot setups can also include many more operating systems, which could include Windows and OS X, as well as the recovery mode and memtest86+ options shown in the screen grab.

The recovery mode entries boot the associated Ubuntu operating system into a command mode from which you can perform various repair functions that are quite technical and therefore beyond the scope of this book.

Instead, I recommend you keep your Ubuntu Live DVD on hand so that you can use it to recover from various problems, using the information supplied on the Ubuntu website: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCdRecovery.

If all else fails and nobody at the Ubuntu forums has been able to provide a solution to fixing a broken installation, you can always reinstall Ubuntu from this DVD. You do keep regular backups of important files, don’t you?

The memtest86+ option is very useful when you suspect you may have a problem with your computer’s system memory. When run, it performs a sequence of stringent tests, reporting any errors it finds (see Figure 2-38).

Figure 2-38. Testing the computer’s system memory

The tests take a few minutes to run, but you can keep track of how far the program has progressed by watching the Pass and Test lines at the top of the screen. The program will continue running these tests indefinitely, but once one complete pass has been made, the program will either display one or more error messages or tell you that there are no errors.

To exit at any time and reboot back to the operating system selection menu, press the Esc key.

When a new distribution is available (which usually happens twice a year, generally in April and October), the top of the Update Manager screen will show the text “New Distribution release 'xx.xx' is available,” where xx.xx will be the release number, as shown in Figure 2-40. If there is no release newer than your current version, this screen will not be shown.

Figure 2-40. A new distribution is available

To upgrade to the new distribution, click the Upgrade button and follow the simple instructions on the screen, entering your password if requested and rebooting when necessary.

If your current release is more than one version older than the latest one, you will need to keep repeating the preceding process to upgrade through all the intermediate releases in turn, until you get to the latest one. When no newer release is available, you have finished.

If your installed release is more than one behind the latest and you wish to avoid upgrading through a number of intermediate versions, you will need to download the ISO image file of the latest version, burn it to disc, and perform a full installation from it. Make sure all your data is fully backed up first, though, because a full installation creates a brand new environment, either replacing your original one or creating a new one alongside it (depending on the option you choose). If you decide to overwrite your current installation, you’ll need to back up and restore all your data and configuration options.