Ubuntu Linux is a fairly new distribution which has now matured and has gained an impressive following in quite a short period of time.
History & Philosophy
Ubuntu is derived from Debian (http://www.debian.org), a community-based distribution with a strong commitment to free software. The Debian project members strongly support the notion that the best software is free software and make a commitment to their users and the Free Software Community generally that Debian will remain 100% free (see http://www.debian.org/social_contract).
However, maintaining such a large distribution with purely volunteer labour is difficult; sometimes people need the additional incentive of payment in order to motivate them to undertake the less 'charismatic' tasks such as packaging new versions of software, patching security flaws and bugs, etc. Canonical Ltd., a new company owned by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, stepped in to sponsor development of a Debian derivative with a regular release cycle, commercial support, security and bug fixes for a defined period after each release, and with features designed to appeal to new users.
Features
Despite fitting on one CD, Ubuntu is a reasonably feature-rich desktop distribution. I've been running it for the last week in place of my regular desktop, and have used it to surf the web, play music, deal with emails, write some articles, including maths formulas, and manage and update various web servers. It's been quite a pleasant experience; while Ubuntu isn't quite as smooth as my usual highly customised box - which has lots of nice fonts, desktop wallpapers and the latest versions of all my favourite applications installed - it's been acceptably good-looking and more than adequately functional.
Ubuntu supplies a good selection of the commonly-required desktop applications, starting with OpenOffice.org 2, which provides the usual word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database facilities. The email client is Evolution; this Outlook look-alike is a lot more stable than when I last tried it, although some might argue that my 15,000-message IMAP server is an unfair test. There's a CD player, a ripper and player, an audio CD creator, theTotem movie player (and it's easy to install Xine as well). I had no trouble watching video online at newspaper web sites, playing MP3's, etc.
For those with other online interests, there's the Gaim IM client, Xchat IRC client and GnomeMeeting, as well as BittTorrent and a client for Windows Terminal Server. There's also the GIMP for photo-editing, XSane scanner utility and a coupe of image viewers.
As you'll see, adding other programs to the initial install is exceptionally easy,
For those who share their computer, it's easy to simultaneously have two or more graphical logins, each with their own desktop, and switch between them.
Hardware Requirements
For a desktop install, you will need around 2 GB of free disk space, though it wouldn't hurt to have a bit more for additional applications and data. You'll also need a minimum of 128 MB of RAM - in my experience this is a real minimum, and a typical user who opens a web browser, several OpenOffice.org windows and an email client will want 512 MB. You can never have too much RAM, in general.
A server installation will require a minimum of 500 MB of disk space and 64 MB of RAM. However, additional applications will require more disk space and RAM, obviously.
Installation
Remember, Linux is an operating system, not an application, and so it needs to format some partitions for its files and swap space. If your entire hard disk is given over to a Windows C: drive (what a waste!) then you'll need to shrink that C: partition to create free space before proceeding. There are various tools which can do this; Partition Magic is the best known, but there's also the free ntfsresize utility (see http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html ). Whenever I've needed to use it, I've found the best approach is to use the version on the SystemRescueCD (http://www.sysresccd.org), which uses QtParted as a graphical front end.
In my own case, I had absolutely no free space left on my desktop machine or my laptop, so I opted to replace the hard drives in the desktop with a spare 80GB drive, and let Ubuntu take care of the partitioning.
Once you have some free space to install into, boot from the Ubuntu CD. The Ubuntu installer is - shock! horror! - a text-mode program. Don't let that intimidate you, though - it's very user-friendly and is configured with sensible defaults for most situations.
Pressing F1 at the boot screen leads to a menu of other options. Most installations will not require any of these, but if you have problems with hardware not being detected correctly, they can be helpful. Most users can simply press Enter to boot.
The installer starts off by asking which language to use for the install - Ubuntu is particularly strong on non-English-language support. Next, it asks for your location - it uses this to make an initial guess at the keyboard type, approximate timezone and also to configure a mirror from which to download additional software packages later.
Next, it configures the network connection; since this is a workstation installation, if it detects a DHCP server on your LAN it will use it to set the IP address, netmask, etc. Then you set the hostname, and then comes the big step - partitioning the hard drive. You may need to manually create partitions; in general, a /boot partition, a swap partition and a few GB for the root (/) filesystem should do it. I simply turned the installer loose on an empty hard disk, and it did it all automatically, creating a 250 MB /boot partition and using the rest of the drive as a Logical Volume Management (LVM) physical volume, from which it carved out 3 GB for a swap partition and used the rest for the root filesystem.
Once the disk has been partitioned, the installer proceeds to copy software packages to the hard drive. Once that has been done, you can enter your account details - real name, username and password. The installer does some final configuration - particularly setting up the boot loader, and then prompts you to reboot. After it reboots from the hard drive, it will proceed to install more packages, then ask you to configure the video resolution, and then you can log in.
Post-installation, the system will contact a nearby Ubuntu software repository and check for updates; if there are any available, it will download and install them, bringing the system to a reasonably secure state. The post-install update of Ubuntu 5.10 downloaded and installed around 110 MB of files, much less than I had expected.
Once the system is installed and configured, you can update the Ubuntu Device Database, using the graphical wizard (Applications -> System Tools -> Ubunto Device Database). This reports your configuration to a central database which can be used by developers to improve auto-detection of hardware for future releases.
User Interface
Linux isn't like Windows, remember - there are many different user interfaces available, ranging from simple text mode to full-blown graphical environments. Ubuntu's standard desktop is GNOME; if you've only ever used Windows, this will look downright strange, but it is quite logical (with a design based on extensive studies of human-machine interaction). There's a menu bar at the top of the screen, for things you can start. These are categorised into Applications (just like that other system's "Start" menu), Places (which mostly starts the Nautilus file browser in various file and network locations) and System (which lets you perform administration tasks and set preferences). The menu can also contain icons for commonly-used applications - by default you'll find icons for Firefox, the Evolution email client, and Gnome Help. At the extreme right of the menu bar are icons for pending software updates, volume control and date/time.
By contrast, the bar at the bottom of the screen has buttons representing the windows currently open. In addition, there's a "hide everything" button at extreme left and four buttons for four different virtual desktops at extreme right.
In between these two bars, there's a remarkably clean and uncluttered desktop, which actually corresponds to the Desktop subdirectory of your home directory - start downloading files and creating documents, and they will appear on-screen.
Nautilus File Browser
Administration
Ubuntu has a similar approach to Apple's OS X: you don't need to know the root password. You certainly shouldn't be logging on as root and then surfing the web - the way people give themselves Administrator privileges in order to get things done is one of the Dirty Little Secrets of the Windows world and one that Microsoft is finally attempting to address in Vista.
When working using the GUI, selecting an administration task, such as System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager, will cause the system to prompt for the user's password. Note: the user's password, not the root password, as on many other systems. This authenticates the user as being who they claim to be; the next question is, does that user have the ability to execute admin commands? The gksudo command will consult the /etc/sudoers file to determine this; the basic logic is that if the user is a member of the admin group, then they are allowed to run programs as root. For example, after starting Synaptic, a ps aux command will reveal that the program is running as root.
Notice that other programs the user starts are not running with any kind of root privileges - only programs specifically started using gksudo (or sudo at the shell prompt) run this way. Consequently the risk of malware somehow obtaining system or root privileges is significantly lower than on certain other platforms.
Software Package Management
Ubuntu builds on Debian's strength in this area; there is a huge selection of software available, and installation is extremely simple.
Software is installed by downloading it from the Ubuntu software repository, which is broken into four different categories:
The Debian package format and apt utility has long been lauded for its elegant handling of package dependencies, and the Synaptic package manager builds on this, making installations extremely easy. For example, selecting the jack audio connection server, automatically adds libjack, upon which it depends, to the download. Similarly, selecting Rosegarden, which is a KDE application, will add various KDE-related library packages. Clicking "Apply" will confirm all upgrades and installs, and then the packages will be downloaded (in parallel, to make best use of bandwidth) and installed.
Browsing through the lists of packages in Synaptic is almost as addictively pleasurable as shopping online, with the added bonus of instant gratification (well, almost, depending on your bandwidth!) as the software is downloaded and installed before your eyes.
Summary
Ubuntu provides a polished desktop distribution for the home and small business user. The combination of community development of a free distribution, backed by paid developers and support, has seen it evolve rapidly. The availability of a huge (almost 20,000 packages) library of applications which can be installed with a few keystrokes adds to its appeal, and its philosophy of using sudo for administration tasks is a great way of stopping novices from logging on and web-surfing as root. It's a well-thought-out distribution and I expect it to gain further in popularity in years to come.
Tech Talk
Logical Volume Management - This is a scheme that allows Linux to collect multiple physical volumes (partitions, possibly across multiple drives) into a single volume group and then subdivide that into logical volumes which will become Linux partitions. The advantages to doing this are that you can now have partitions that are larger than a single drive (great for really large data sets), and that you can add a new drive to a system and increase the size of existing logical volumes. LVM also makes it easy to resize partitions inm response to changing needs.
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