A Guide on How to Install Ubuntu 15.04 with Screenshots

Ubuntu is a Debian based Linux operating system for servers, desktop computers, tablets, phones and TVs. Word Ubuntu means humanity or humanity to others. A UK based company Canonical Ltd led by a South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth is developing Ubuntu but it is an open source product so further customizations or modifications can be done by anybody. Ubuntu is getting great popularity among the PC users because of being free of cost, lightweight and ease of use through legacy desktop.

Ubuntu is more secure and less vulnerable to Viruses and Trojans because of its custom configurations, less privileged and more privileged (super user/root) divide, implementation of Polkit (short for policy kit: it controls system wide privileges and provide a mechanism for communication between less privileged processes and more privileged processes), most of the network ports are blocked by default and so on.

Main Features

Ubuntu comes with few very nice set of preinstalled features. We will have a glance at few but not all here.

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Mozila Firefox is an open source cross platform web browser. It is fast and feature rich web browser occupying from 12% to 20% of desktop usage and considered to be world’s third largest browser being used.

Mozila Thunderbird is another wonderful product from Mozila Fountation which is open source and freely available for almost all platforms. Mozilla Thunderbird is an email client with historically studded with enormous features but now further development for new features has been limited because the investments made are not showing desired incentives.

Transmission is free bit torrent software under GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) which is cross platform and has a simple interface.

Games like Sudoku and Chess are lightweight number-placing puzzle and intelligence challenging fronts.

Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Verveta)

Ubuntu gets major release of the year 2015, it has several changes from the previous LTS release.

• As compared to kernel version of 3.16 for Ubuntu LTS 14.04 Ubuntu 15.04 gets new kernel 3.19.3 which is better at handling graphics and file systems
• All applications now use local menus by default rather than global menu but one can explicit switch to global menus
• Vivid Verveta uses latest iteration of unity 7.3 for desktop
• Updated versions of all the preinstalled features/applications
• Almost all Linux flavors especially all Ubuntu versions had init manager but now it has been switched to upstart system

Download Page

You can download desktop , server and cloud version for 32 / 64 bit from the below pages

Ubuntu Desktop and Server 

Ubuntu Cloud Server

Installing Ubuntu 15.04

Download desired ISO file from Ubuntu 15.04 official release repository according to your requirements and flash it on Bootable USB or burn on bootable CD/DVD. System will boot through the bootable media and two options will be on offer at first by the installation wizard, either try the operating system without installing or install ubuntu. Click 「Install Ubuntu」 to proceed.

System requirements and available resources are checked before proceeding further. Click 「Continue」 if your system has enough resources.

Installation wizard then provides various installation types. Opt for the option best suits you, normally, first option is chosen by most i.e. 「Erase disk and install Ubuntu」. With this option make sure that your data is backed up properly because the disk (partition) will be erased and all data will be lost.

A dialog box shows the list of disk partitions being formatted and used by the Ubuntu. Click 「Continue」 to move to next step.

Choose your location for time zone selection and click 「Continue」.

Choose the keyboard layout, you can test it by typing in the text field provided in the same dialog box and click on 「Detect Keyboard Layout」, once done, click 「Continue」 to proceed further.

Fill in your information and choose the root/super user password and click continue.

Installation process starts with copying files. It is a slightly lengthy process which may further proceed through installing system, downloading/installing language packs from the internet if connected to internet, configuring hardware, etc.

Congratulations! Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Verveta) has successfully installed. A restart is required for finalizing installation.

After the reboot, insert the root/super user password to login.

Upgrading from Ubuntu 14.10 to Ubuntu 15.04 Server From CLi

Ubuntu releases its LTS (Long Term Support) version every two years. If you want to upgrade to Ubuntu 15.04 which is not LTS then we will have to tell the upgrade manager to upgrade from a Ubuntu LTS 14.04/14.10 to normal Ubuntu 15.04 release.

Run the following command in terminal to install the core update manager on the system.

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Once done, we need to tell system to upgrade from an LTS version to a normal release, to do so we need to edit the release config file using the following command.

sudo gedit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades

Now find the label "Prompt=LTS" and changed it to "Prompt=normal" and save the changes made to the file so that we can upgrade to a non-LTS version of ubuntu i.e Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Verveta.

Run the following command to update apt-get repository.

sudo apt-get update

Finally run the below command to upgrade to latest release of Ubuntu.

sudo do-release-upgrade

Upgrading Ubuntu desktop from Ubuntu 14.10 to Ubuntu 15.04

Upgrading the Desktop version of Ubuntu 14.10 to Ubuntu 15.04 through graphical interface is a straight forward process.

Launch Update-Manager (Software Updater) from Unity or command line.

Software Updater will populate the applications with available updates.

Before proceeding with "Install Now" click on "Settings". Ubuntu 14.10 is LTS version and by default software updater will show any LTS version of Ubuntu for update so version 15.04 will not be shown as an available update.

Now click on "Updates" tab and choose the option "for any new version" at bottom drop down menu under caption "Notify me of a new Ubuntu version".

Click "Close" and on the previous screen click "Install Now", all applications will be updated first and then a pop up will appear for Ubuntu new version available. Click "Upgrade" and the wizard will upgrade Ubuntu to 15.04.

Congratulations, you have successfully upgraded to latest version of Ubuntu.

Summary

Ubuntu 15.04 is not an LTS version but it has some major changes especially the switch to init to system. Overall it is a good and solid upgrade with a lot of new features. Alongside that the new version may also have some bugs which will be discovered and fixed as the time goes on. For further reading please visit the Ubuntu official website.