So you meet all of the requirements. Great! Now what? I do not know. All of the guides are written so as to work together in a ‘from scratch’ install. But that is not to say that you can not pick and chose which guides to use based on your own knowledge and most of all what you want your computer to do for you.

If following these guides out of order, beware your results may vary depending on how your machine has been previously setup. Deviation from the guide is only recommended if you already know your system settings and are able to understand these guides in a big picture way as opposed to a step by step process.

Step 1. Is not Installation. The first thing you do is get on your personal machine (i.e. the one you are reading this on right now) fire up your preferred internet browser and surf over to http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download. When you arrive you are going to see that you have several different choices as to what flavor of Ubuntu you want to download. As of this writing the current release version is Ubuntu 7.10 - Supported to 2009 code named Gutsy Gibbon. Since this guide is written with ease of use foremost in mind we are going to select Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Edition. You are then asked to identify your machines processor architecture. If yours is anything other than the default Standard Personal Computer you will know and can chose the correct option accordingly. Chose your location and download. The file you download should be called ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso. It will be quite large nearly 700 megabytes (one standard CD-R worth of data) and will take most of you at least a couple hours to download. While that is downloading you might as well figure out what to do with the file once you get it. Iso files are CD image files. Basically a picture of what the data on the CD looks like. Because it is an image of a file system and not the files themselves we will need to download a CD burning program that supports burning from .iso files. We will tackle that next time...