Chapter 1. Welcome to Ubuntu The Linux kernel (http://www.kernel.org/) first appeared in 1991, when a Finnish computing science student named Linus Torvalds announced an early version of a replacement kernel for Minix to the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix . See Linux International’s Linux History Page (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html). Linus Torvalds continues to coordinate the work of several hundred developers with the help of a number of subsystem maintainers. There is an official website (http://www.kernel.org/) for the Linux kernel. Information about the linux-kernel mailing list can be found on the linux-kernel mailing list FAQ (http://www.tux.org/lkml/). Linux users have immense freedom of choice in their software. For example, Linux users can choose from a dozen different command line shells and several graphical desktops. This selection is often bewildering to users of other operating systems, who are not used to thinking of the command line or desktop as something that they can change. Linux is also less likely to crash, better able to run more than one program at the same time, and more secure than many operating systems. With these advantages, Linux is the fastest growing operating system in the server market. More recently, Linux has begun to be popular among home and business users as well. For information on how to download Ubuntu from the Internet, see the download web page (http://www.ubuntu.com/download/). The list of Ubuntu mirrors (http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Archive) contains a full set of official Ubuntu mirrors, so you can easily find the nearest one. Ubuntu can be upgraded after installation very easily. The installation procedure will help set up the system so that you can make those upgrades once installation is complete, if need be. This document is constantly being revised. Updated versions of this installation manual are available from the official Install Manual pages (http://help.ubuntu.com/20.04/installation-guide/arm64/). This document is meant to serve as a manual for first-time Ubuntu users. It tries to make as few assumptions as possible about your level of expertise. However, we do assume that you have a general understanding of how the hardware in your computer works. Expert users may also find interesting reference information in this document, including minimum installation sizes, details about the hardware supported by the Ubuntu installation system, and so on. We encourage expert users to jump around in the document. In general, this manual is arranged in a linear fashion, walking you through the installation process from start to finish. Here are the steps in installing Ubuntu, and the sections of this document which correlate with each step: 1. Determine whether your hardware meets the requirements for using the installation system, in Chapter 2. 5 1.6. Organization of This Document 1.5. Getting the Newest Version of This Document 1.4. Getting Ubuntu