# Installing Linux

Now that we've seen how Windows is installed,

let's go ahead and install the Linux operating system.

Remember how I said that Linux has

many different versions of

their operating system called distributions?

There are countless articles that highlights the pros

and cons of the hundreds of distributions out there.

We'll go with the most popular consumer distribution, Ubuntu. I've already loaded Ubuntu on a plain USB drive pro tip.

Since the Ubuntu is open source,

you can download the free

operating system installed image

directly from their website and

install it using whatever media you like.

I've included a link to it

in the next supplemental reading.

I should also call out that you can't just copy

the install file to a USB drive and expect it to work.

It has to be copied in a way that makes

a USB device bootable from our bios.

To load the image onto

your USB device and make it bootable,

you can use a tool like etcher.io.

Go power on. Remember we're going to make sure

that we want to boot from the USB device.

Now that it's loaded, you'll see

an option if you want to try using

the operating system first

or just install the operating system,

we're going to do a fresh install the operating system.

The Ubuntu logo will pop

up and then we're going to have to go through

a couple of loading screens

while the system is installing.

We're just going to go ahead and skip through all of

these and just pick the defaults for now.

Now, it asks us for our name,

a computer name or host name then a username.

The host name is used to identify

the computer when it needs to talk to

other computers or personal computer it's

common to just use our own names for our computer's name.

But an IT organization,

we want to choose a good host name that

follows a certain standardization.

We'll go over that in a later lesson.

But for now, let's just use

an industry standard for

hosting like username dash location.

I'm going to go and enter in my name, Cindy.

Then for the host name field,

I'm going to type Cindy- NYC.

Then for the password, we're just going to password here.

Then we're going to confirm.

Then we're going to hit Next. Then it'll

ask us to re-start once it's done.

Also now that's restarted.

Let's go ahead and login.

Great. Now we're in the Ubuntu desktop environment.

Here you can see where applications are laid out.

On the left-hand side here we

have a doc that we can add shortcuts to.

This layout may change since the Ubuntu is

changing their desktop environment in the near future.

On the top right-hand bar here,

you'll see quick settings for your computer,

like network connectivity,

Bluetooth connectivity, sound and volume.

There's also the time,

a menu to power off,

restart, sleep, and log out of your machine.

Let's click on this menu and select system settings.

From here, you can change

your system settings like your screensaver,

resolution, hardware settings and more.

Let's go back to our desktop and

select this icon here for files.

This opens up a window so we can view our files.

You can see the different files and folders here.

If I click on computer,

I'm taken to the main directory of my system.

We're going to get to this in depth in a later course.

For now, I'm just going to head back to my desktop.

Now, let's do the exact same thing we

did with our Windows machine and create a file.

This time, let's just use commands in the shell.

Because we're a GUI,

we don't have a program called

bash that we run our commands in.

Instead we open up the search utility

here and search for an application called Terminal.

When you open up the Terminal,

you will see your username and add symbol,

the host name, colon,

Tilda, and then slash desktop as your command prompt.

This is used to show who's running the command.

This will be more important in

another course as you switch users.

The last portion of the prompt

shows you where you are on the computer,

we'll learn more about this in a later lesson 2.

But you can see that we're currently in our desktop.

You can verify that we're using

the Bash shell with a simple command,

echo, dollar sign shell.

The echo command just prints

out texts options to the display.

In this case, the argument dollar sign shell is

the current shell/ bin/bash or Bash.

You could even do echo hello.

It will display hello, which isn't as useful.

Let's create a file in our shell.

Could you use the touch command?

Touch my super cool file.

Here you can see it made a file on our desktop.

There are many different commands you can use to make

a file with the touch command is one of the simpler ones.

Right now, it might be hard to

understand why you have to memorize

Linux shell commands when

it's easier to use a Windows GUI.

If you'll be working with any Linux machines,

it's essential that you know these commands.