An Introduction to Ubuntu

Have you heard of Ubuntu? Pronounced oo-BOON-too. It’s an operating system. What is an operating system? An operating system is what controls your computer and its many functions. It is part of the interface between you and your computer. A popular operating system that is equivalent to Ubuntu (as far as functionality) is Windows XP or Windows Vista.

So what is Ubuntu?

Here’s what the website says.

Ubuntu is a community developed, Linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need – a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more.

Linux is an operating system developed by Linus Torvalds and is based on the Unix operating system that’s been around for years. Linus was the creator and then a community of folks embraced Linux and took it to new heights.

For this video I installed Ubuntu 8.04 in a VM using VMware. VMware is a program that I talked about in my article How To Run Multiple Operating Systems On One Computer.

If you’d like run Ubuntu 8.04 for free, Browse over to VMware and download the VMware Player. VMware Player is a program that allows you to run VM Appliances for free. The Ubuntu VM Appliance is here. Download and install the player for free and then download the appliance to run in the player.

A note on VMware – When running VMware and VMs you’ll need quite a bit of memory and disk space. I recommend no less than 2GB of memory and as much disk space as you can afford. The Ubuntu VM I created for this video ended up taking approximately 3GB of disk space but I allowed 8GB of disk space to be used when I created the VM. Compared to a Microsoft Vista VM I created that requires about 40GB. So you can see, if you decide to run multiple VMs, you need hoards of disk space. 🙂 I’ve dedicated one 500GB external hard drive to VMs.

Also, for this video I’m using Viddler but I also have it at YouTube as well as Revver. I’m playing with video settings for these screencasts and trying to come up with the best settings. Time consuming.