Installing Ubuntu Linux on your personal machine

The department has a large number of desktop machines which are running Ubuntu Linux. The department uses the long term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu which is released every two years. Ubuntu produce other (non-LTS) releases every 6 months. An LTS release receives secuirty updates for 5 years (which is longer than other releases) and can be a little more robust than the other releases. The other 6 monthly releases will better track new features and support very new hardware.

You may wish to install Ubuntu Linux on your personal machine. The links below point to helpful resources.

• Getting Ubuntu - note the installer is also a live version so you can even try it out before you install it simply running it from a CD or USB pen disk
• Video guides - there are numerous guides on YouTube, below are links to a few
  • 10 minute video with simple instructions - note this is not for the latest version but is still fairly accurate
  • 5 minute video with simple instructions - note this is not for the latest version but is still fairly accurate
  • 10 minute video on dual boot ubuntu and windows
  • 10 minute video on dual boot ubuntu and windows - install is from a USB pen disk so good for netbooks too
  • 5 minute video on dual boot ubuntu and windows
  • 5 minute video on dual boot ubuntu and windows - not the most helpful guide but you may wish to see it
  • 5 minute video on installing ubuntu using wubi - this is an MS windows based ubuntu installer that installs ubuntu on the Windows C drive without the need to repartition the system as with a normal dual boot install
  • 6 minute video on installing ubuntu on a netbook - i.e. when you do not have a CD/DVD drive and need to instead install from a USB pen disk
  • 10 minute video on how to make a USB Startup/bootable pen disk
  • 6 minute video on how to make a USB Startup/bootable pen disk - note this example uses slax but the same principle applies to make a bootable Ubuntu USB pen disk
• Web guides
  • Installing Ubuntu Linux
  • Installing Dual boot Windows/Linux
  • Installing Ubuntu Linux within MS Windows - can be a useful way to try out Ubuntu more safely/easily than a full dual boot install and for longer than using a Live CD etc
  • How to create a bootable USB pen disk from which you can install Linux - useful when installing to a netbook etc that does not have a CD/DVD drive
• How to resize a Windows partition to make space for a Linux install - this can be done from within Windows, with separate partitioning software or from within the Ubuntu installer itself
• Advice and help if switching from MS Windows to Ubuntu
• Installing further software in Ubuntu Linux

If you wish to install a similar set of software to that installed on the departmental Linux machines you can get various package listings that can help, e.g.

On a departmental machine you could run

deborphan -anp required --no-show-section > mi-packages.txt

which should list all packages that are not a dependency of any other package. As such if one then installs this list of packages on another machine it will pull in all the dependencies too and should closely match the original machine. The above command will probably list about 1000 packages out of the roughly 3700 that get installed onto the departmental systems (i.e. there are lots of dependencies of the main list of packages chosen for installation).

In principle one can then install this set of packages on another machine with a command of the form

apt-get --no-install-recommends install `cat mi-packages.txt`

This will fail if the list contains packages not available to you, e.g. ones from other repositories not setup, commercial packages and ones the department has built for its own needs. If one removes those from the file, i.e. any it lists as an error, it should ultimately run and install all the remaining packages in the list.

For departmental machines the standard software repositories we use as shown in a source.list file are

deb http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/sites/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid main restricted
deb http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/sites/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid-updates main restricted
deb http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/sites/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid universe
deb http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/sites/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid-updates universe
deb http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/sites/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid multiverse
deb http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/sites/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid-updates multiverse

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid-security main restricted
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid-security universe
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid-security multiverse

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu lucid partner
deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ lucid free non-free