Once you have succesfully booted from the CD a screen will appear that says Ubuntu at the top and a menu below it, select the option that says something like “boot from CD” (First option in the list). Give it a minute to boot and you should be greeted by a desktop that has an orange flavor to it. Congratulations, this is Ubuntu linux in its simplist form. You are looking at a “Live” linux desktop. Basically it is running off the CD and giving you a desktop. From here I like to run onto the internet to make sure that the internet is working and I like to test my mouse, keyboard ect. just to make sure everything works before I continue so that I know I won’t have any surprises while installing the system. After that you just have to double click the icon on the desktop called “Install” and follow the instructions for the installation to proceed. If you have any doubts or questions about setting up Ubuntu during the installation process such as how to partition your hard drives or questions about what it is asking you, you can always hop onto the internet with that live desktop you have there (it still works during the installation) and go to ubuntuguide.org and look up your problem there. Ubuntuguide.org is a great resource for anyone using Ubuntu, they have answeres for just about any question you could ever have for Ubuntu.

Post Install Shinyness

If you have finsihed the install and are back in the desktop (off the live cd) congratulations, you are done with ALL of the hard parts, and this time I’m not lying I promise. So let’s start configuring the desktop to operate optimaly for your desktop and get it updated and learn a little about how this thing operates

The first thing you will notice is, if you have an internet connection for the machine, is a bubble at the top right of the screen that looks much like an alert from Windows XP telling that there are updates available. Click the icon in the menu above the bubble that looks like an orange square to open up the update manager. It will build a list of available updates. Just click the Install updates button and leave it be for a while. I it will download and install all of the updates for your machine. Once it is done, there will be another bubble that appears telling you that it is done and that a reboot is required. This is one of the few required reboots you will ever see in Linux. Reboots are only required when a kernel update is done since the kernel is the base system that your machine is running on and in order to load the new one, you must shut down the old one by doing a reboot.

After your machine has rebooted you can start to explore the menues and right click feature for the desktop. The best way to learn how things work on this interface is just start clicking on different menu items and see what they all do. And before I forget, if you ever click on something that pops up a password box asking for the root or administer/adminstrator password. This is something that could potentially mess up your system that should only be messed with if you know what you are doing, the password is sort of a safeguard that prevents unauthorized people from changing these things and messing up the whole computer, it is advised that unless you are following a tutorial that tells you to do something with these features or you know what your doing to not mess with these things.

Congratulations!!!

Well thats it for Part 2. You should now have a working Ubuntu 6.10 desktop. Feel free to mess around with the desktop to sort of get a feel for how it operates and how the file system is structured. Another thing you can do until I post Part 3 is go to Ubuntuguide.org and read through some of the articles. There is a lot of information there and you can learn how to do things far beyond what this guide will show you how to accomplish.

For further assistance I am providing my personal email address on every post from here on out in case anyone following the guide hits a problem that neither the guide, google or ubuntuguide.org can figure out. So please feel free to send me an email and I can help you out personally with any problems you may have.

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