Today, we're installing Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on a laptop! Join me for a walkthrough of the steps to download the ISO, flash it to a USB drive, select it from the boot menu, and install the OS.
Download Ubuntu here: https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
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Download Ubuntu here: https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
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Join the Nerd Club: http://nerdclub.nots.co
Official website: https://nerdonthestreet.com
Discord server: https://discord.nots.co
Subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/nerdonthestreet
Facebook page: https://facebook.com/NerdOnTheStreet
Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/NOTS_Network
E-Mail: jacob@nerdonthestreet.com
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TechTranscript
00:00Hello everyone, I'm Jacob Kauf, and I'm the Nerd on the Street, and today we're installing
00:03Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
00:06Alright everyone, Ubuntu 24.04, codenamed NobleNumRat, came out just a few months ago
00:18earlier this year.
00:20I have gotten a chance to use it a little bit, I have not made a video about it yet,
00:23but seeing as my 22.04 installation video is still one of my highest performing videos
00:27every month, I figured I might as well make a 24.04 one here.
00:31So today I'm going to show you how to install Ubuntu on your computer.
00:34Ubuntu is a very common distribution that beginners start off with, so if you're new
00:37to Linux, I'm going to show you just how easy it is to set up and start using.
00:41Now you are going to need a couple of things as prerequisites to this.
00:44For one thing, you're going to need a flash drive, and the Ubuntu installation image is
00:48about 6GB, it's pretty large this time around, so you're going to want a flash drive that's
00:52about 8GB or larger in order to install this.
00:55If you've got a smaller one, there are NetInstall and other images you can look into, but I'm
00:59just going to show you the standard image, 8GB is going to make your life easier.
01:03The other big prerequisite, you're going to need a computer that you're going to install
01:06Ubuntu onto, obviously, and you do want to backup all of the files that are on that computer.
01:11I'm going to show you how to do a standard clean installation that is going to leave
01:14Ubuntu as the only operating system on the machine.
01:17You can always put Windows back on it later, but this process of installing Ubuntu as I'm
01:21going to show it to you is going to wipe out everything else on the drive that you select.
01:25So if you have any files that you want to save on the computer, make sure to back them
01:28up to an external storage drive, a cloud provider, or somewhere else, another computer, where
01:32they won't be affected when you wipe the drive that you install Ubuntu to.
01:36That's just about everything you need, I'm going to show you how to create the installation
01:39image first, then we'll install, so I'm going to go ahead and cut to the desktop.
01:43Okay everyone, and here we are on the desktop.
01:45As you can see, I'm going to show you how to create the installation image from Windows
01:4811, just as an example, but the method I'm going to show you will actually work on all
01:53operating systems, so if you've got a Mac or you're already on Linux, no worries.
01:57So I'm going to open up a web browser, and the first place we're going to go is ubuntu.com
02:01in order to download Ubuntu.
02:02Now as you can see on the homepage here, Canonical is not necessarily prioritizing the desktop,
02:07there's no download button right on the front page, other than for a white paper, which
02:10is not what we're looking for.
02:12In fact, the entire Ubuntu section of the website is somewhat hidden from ubuntu.com,
02:16you gotta go to Products up here, and then click Ubuntu Desktop, from there we're going
02:20to click on the green Download Ubuntu Desktop button, and then right here we have a green
02:24Download 24.04 LTS button.
02:27So we'll click on that, and that's going to start our download here.
02:30You don't actually have to sign up for the newsletter here, so do not feel obligated
02:34to do that.
02:35As you can see, like I said, the image is quite large at 5.7 gigabytes, they rounded
02:39up to 6 on their website for telling you how large it is.
02:43That is going to take a few minutes to download, while that is running, we're going to open
02:46up a new tab, and I'm going to go and download a tool to flash Ubuntu onto a flash drive.
02:51For that we're going to go to etcher.io, that is E-T-C-H-E-R dot I-O.
02:57This is a quite old tool, it's going to redirect me to where it lives now.
03:01And if you're on Mac OS and you want to use Disk Utility, or if you're on Linux and you
03:04already know of a different tool to do this, you can flash the ISO image onto your flash
03:08drive using whatever program you want, but Etcher is available for all major platforms,
03:12so we're going to click on the green Download Etcher button.
03:15As you can see, you've got Linux, Mac OS, and as I've got here, Windows.
03:19I'll go ahead and click on that, and it's going to download quite a bit faster than
03:23the Ubuntu image.
03:24Now even though this .exe file has setup in the name, you don't really have to install
03:28it, it just extracts itself, and then opens up automatically.
03:31So I'll just click on that to open it up, and in just a moment here we will get our
03:37Etcher application window.
03:38At this point I do need to wait for that Ubuntu image to finish downloading.
03:43Alright, and that is finally finished downloading.
03:45So with that out of the way, I will minimize the web browser, and we're back here in Etcher.
03:49Etcher is a very simple program.
03:51It's got three steps as you can see.
03:53First we're going to select our file, and I'll just navigate over to our Downloads folder,
03:57and there's Ubuntu 24.04.
03:59I'll open that up.
04:00Next we select our target.
04:02As you can see, I have not plugged in my USB flash drive yet, so there's nothing in the
04:05list here.
04:06I'm going to go ahead and do that right now.
04:09After just a moment, that flash drive shows up in the list.
04:12Before we proceed here, the flash drive will also be wiped, so don't use your backup drive
04:17for this.
04:18Use a different flash drive specifically for the installation.
04:20Alright, so we've selected our image, we've selected our drive.
04:23Next all we have to do is click Flash, and that's going to begin the process.
04:26We'll click Yes on the User Account Control here on Windows, and we have begun flashing.
04:32This part of the process, as well as the rest of the installation, will depend on your specific
04:35flash drive, how fast it is, what version of USB it's using, and how fast the computer's
04:40port is.
04:41As you can see, for me it's going to take, again, a few minutes, so I'll be right back
04:44when that's close to completion.
04:48Alright so as you can see, I have finished flashing at this point, and after Etcher finishes
04:52flashing the image, it will go through and validate the image, just reading it back and
04:56comparing it to that file one more time.
05:01Alright and at this point you can see that flash is completed, so at this point we can
05:04go ahead and close out of Etcher, and back here on the desk I can go ahead and unplug
05:08that USB drive from the computer now.
05:10Now I'm going to pull this laptop off of the desk, and here's the one we're installing
05:14Ubuntu onto today.
05:16So plug in the flash drive into the computer you're installing to, and the next couple
05:20of steps are actually going to depend on your specific computer.
05:23I can't give you the steps for every single computer out there, because different brands
05:27are different, and even different models within the same brand are sometimes different, but
05:31you're going to need to access the boot menu for your computer.
05:34If you turn your computer on, for a lot of brands it will actually say somewhere on the
05:38screen, press this button to access the BIOS or UAFI setup menu, and then another button
05:43to access the boot menu.
05:45So I'm going to turn this computer on here.
05:46This is a System76 laptop running their Open Firmware, which means I'm going to get a prompt
05:51here in a moment to hit the escape key, and I'll go ahead and do that.
05:56So in your firmware menu for your computer, you're just going to want to go, and you can
06:01change the boot order if you need to, if you can't figure out how to just do a one-time
06:04boot, but really all we need to do is boot from the flash drive this one time.
06:08So here I'm going to go to one-time boot, and at the bottom of this here, this is the
06:11name of my flash drive.
06:12So I'm going to select that, and that's going to boot us up into the flash drive's grub
06:17menu here, and I'm going to select Try or Install Ubuntu, the default option.
06:21Now again, this boot up sequence that we're seeing here will vary in length based on the
06:26speed of the port and the drive that you're using.
06:30But after just a couple minutes here, we've got our Welcome to Ubuntu screen, which is
06:34going to load up our installer.
06:40And I have quickly set up a capture card so you can see what's on the screen here in a
06:43little bit higher quality.
06:44But now we can go through the Ubuntu installer, and most of these things are going to be pretty
06:48straightforward.
06:49You probably didn't have to watch a video to figure out how to do this.
06:51We're going to select our language, English is the default.
06:55Next up, if you need any accessibility options, you can select those here.
06:58I'm just going to continue on.
06:59We'll select our keyboard layout, again, English US is the default.
07:03Next we'll connect to the internet.
07:04I would recommend doing this generally.
07:06Obviously, we downloaded six gigabytes of data and flashed it onto that flash drive
07:10earlier, so you can install offline if you want to.
07:13But if you do connect to the internet, you can do things like download updates while
07:16we're installing, which will save you time after the installation's finished.
07:19So I'll go ahead and select my network here, I'll click Connect, and I'll continue on.
07:23And here we have options to try or install Ubuntu.
07:26So this is actually a fully functional live environment that we're in right now.
07:30You can go and open up applications.
07:32If you've never used Linux before and you want to check it out, see if it's easy enough
07:35for you to use, you can actually do it without even touching the installed operating system
07:39that's already on your computer.
07:40You can try it out right now.
07:41It is going to run a little bit slowly because everything that's loaded up here is coming
07:45directly off of that flash drive over USB.
07:48And you're also going to have limits on how much stuff you can install and how much data
07:51you can save.
07:52Basically, any changes you make right now are only going to be happening in your RAM.
07:56So if you've got, say, eight gigabytes of RAM, you can't make more than eight gigabytes
07:59worth of changes to this live environment right now.
08:02But if you do just want to try out the live environment, you can click Try Ubuntu.
08:05If you click Close right here, it will actually just quit the installer and you can try it
08:08out.
08:09Obviously, I'm making a video here about how to install Ubuntu, so we're going to select
08:12that one.
08:14Over here, we're going to select Interactive Installation because we are sitting in front
08:17of a GUI right now and interacting with a computer.
08:20And next, we get to select what apps we want to install.
08:22So I'm going to show you the default selection, and as it calls it, it's just the essentials.
08:27It's going to be a quicker installation.
08:29It is going to have less pre-installed stuff once the installation is finished.
08:33So you're going to have a little bit less, you might call it bloatware if you don't like
08:36it.
08:37If you do like it, it's just going to be less utilities and stuff that are installed.
08:40As you can see, the Extended Selection says it's got an offline-friendly selection of
08:43Office tools, particularly it will install LibreOffice and a few more utilities.
08:47Now, anything in the Extended Selection that you want, you can go back and install that
08:51stuff after the installation is complete.
08:53So this is not anything permanent.
08:55I'm just going to show you how to have the streamlined default selection.
08:59So we'll go with that one.
09:01This next page offers us third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi hardware.
09:05Some of that's going to be proprietary.
09:06As you can see, the description says it includes but is not limited to the NVIDIA drivers.
09:11This particular laptop that I'm showing you does have an NVIDIA graphics card, so I am
09:14going to select that.
09:16And down here, we have the option to install codecs for MP3, MP4, video and audio formats
09:21like that.
09:22I'm going to go ahead and select that as well.
09:23Unless you're particularly trying to avoid proprietary software on this system, there's
09:27no reason why you shouldn't just check both of these.
09:29So clicking on Next again, the next page is our Disk Setup.
09:32Now I've already got Ubuntu installed on this system, so it's giving me an option to automatically
09:37partition the system and install this new Ubuntu installation alongside the old one.
09:42That's not what I want to do.
09:43I'm just going to select Erase Disk and install Ubuntu.
09:46So if you just want to have Ubuntu on your computer, clean slate, this is what you're
09:49going to want to select.
09:50Depending on your OS, if you do want to dual boot, if you get an automatic option like
09:55this, then you can absolutely select that if you're not ready to go full on Ubuntu.
09:59If you don't get that automatic option and you do want to partition, then you'd have
10:03to go down here to Manual Installation.
10:05It's going to give you options to resize your partitions and everything.
10:08And if you're going to do that, you should really have a backup of all your files anyway,
10:11just in case any of that does go wrong.
10:13Like I said, for simplicity's sake, I'm just going to erase disk and install Ubuntu.
10:17If you're wondering what's in the Advanced Features here, this is where you can select
10:20to use Logical Volume Management if you want to do something a little bit more complicated
10:24with your partition setup.
10:25LVM is also how you would have full disk encryption if you want to enable that.
10:29We also have the Experimental option to use ZFS, which is a more modern file system but
10:33is not part of the Linux kernel due to licensing issues.
10:37And you can also use Encryption if you select the ZFS option.
10:39I love ZFS.
10:40I use it on my network-attached storage, but I would not recommend installing it on your
10:44desktop just because it is still experimental for desktop usage and is not fully integrated
10:48in with Linux.
10:50That said, it is generally a best practice to use full disk encryption on systems, especially
10:54a laptop like the one I'm using.
10:56There's really no reason not to.
10:57The performance impact, if you're wondering, is negligible on any modern computer.
11:01So just to show you what that looks like, I am going to select that option.
11:04Again, if you don't care about full disk encryption, if you want to be able to pull your files
11:07off without remembering a password later, then you can just select None and go with
11:11the defaults.
11:12But I am going to click Next here with that option set up.
11:14Since I selected that LVM with Encryption option, I'm being given the option to create
11:18a passphrase.
11:20This is a different password than the one that you'll use to actually log in and perform
11:23actions when your computer boots.
11:25This is just basically a startup password that is going to decrypt your disk when you
11:29turn the computer on.
11:30It's not a BIOS password.
11:32It's on the disk itself, but it's actually more secure than a BIOS password because unlike
11:36that one, this encryption passphrase will still be required if someone removes the storage
11:40drive from this computer and puts it in another one.
11:42So I am going to enter in a passphrase here.
11:44We will want to confirm it.
11:46As you can see, if you lose your encryption passphrase, you will lose all of your data.
11:50It's pretty easy to go in and reset the user account password in Linux if you forget that
11:54one, and even the root password.
11:56You can reset that.
11:57However, if you forget the encryption password, it basically renders your entire storage drive
12:02just random data.
12:03So if you're going to write anything down on a piece of paper, this is the one you'd
12:07want to write down and make sure you don't forget.
12:09So I'll click on Next, and here's where we actually set up our user account.
12:12So I'm going to type in my name.
12:14As you can see, we get some default options in the computer name and username.
12:19I like to set mine a little bit differently than what Ubuntu suggests.
12:22I'm just going to put in the model number of the computer I'm using for the computer
12:26name.
12:27And then the username just needs to be all lowercase.
12:28I do like to make it just my first name.
12:30But you can set those to whatever you want.
12:32The computer name at least could be changed later.
12:34Even the username can be if you want to.
12:36So here I'm going to set up my user password, and you might want to just make this the same
12:40as your encryption password if that makes it easier to remember.
12:43But again, this one's the one you're actually going to use to log in, to unlock the computer
12:47after it wakes up from sleep, and to perform administrative tasks like installing updates.
12:51All right, so we'll go ahead and click Next here, and it's going to automatically detect
12:55my time zone.
12:56If it doesn't, then you can click where you are on the map.
12:59Click on Next again, and this is the last page.
13:01It's going to ask us to review all of our choices we've made, take a look at this carefully.
13:05Once again, the way that I'm showing you how to do this with erasing the disk and installing
13:09Ubuntu will absolutely wipe out everything that's on the storage drive already.
13:13Again, here we're going to have our EFI partition and our boot partition.
13:16Those actually won't be encrypted, but the final partition with all of our user data
13:19on it, that one's the one that's going to have that LVM structure on it, and our encryption
13:23will be there.
13:25So we'll click Install here, and Ubuntu's going to give you a little bit of a slideshow
13:28that you can watch while we're waiting for that installation to complete.
13:31If you want to see the details of what's happening in the installation, you can go ahead and
13:34click this icon in the bottom right.
13:36It's going to open up a terminal that actually shows you exactly what it's doing.
13:39It's going to plug in everything that you put in in the installer earlier into basically
13:43commands that it's running automatically.
13:45So all that's running here in the terminal.
13:47If you do want to see the nice slideshow that they have, we can click through that.
13:51They're advertising some proprietary apps, some open source apps, got some coding apps
13:56here, we've got some creative apps, gaming apps, really just advertising a lot of apps
14:02these days, I guess, and their slideshow.
14:06On the final page here, we're going to have some links.
14:08You actually can click on these links.
14:11Once again, since we're running in an actual live environment, this is a working Ubuntu
14:14environment that we're in.
14:15If you click on one of these links, it will open up Firefox and go to whichever link you
14:19clicked on.
14:20So you can go and read a little bit about Ubuntu, read the documentation, check out
14:24what people are saying while you're actually waiting for it to finish installing.
14:28Just remember any bookmarks or anything that you save in this live environment, they're
14:31not going to be there when you reboot here into the installed system in a moment.
14:35So I'm going to open up the terminal again.
14:36We'll just watch this run.
14:39And the installation is complete.
14:41So at this point, once again, we could click continue testing, that would exit the installer
14:45and you can keep using the live environment.
14:47But as the installer notes, any changes you make in this live environment will not be
14:50saved.
14:51So we want to click the green button that says restart now.
14:53And I'm going to cut back to the camera here because when we restart, this is going to
14:57eventually ask us to go ahead and remove that USB drive.
15:03We've got some errors after it.
15:05You don't have to worry about those.
15:07As you can see, it says, please remove the installation medium.
15:08That's our flash drive.
15:10Then press enter.
15:11So I'll go ahead and do that.
15:12I'll unplug the flash drive and I'll press enter.
15:15So now the computer will reboot.
15:16It should boot up much quicker this time since we're going off of our internal SSD and not
15:20that flash drive anymore.
15:23And we're going to get a grub screen here.
15:25It's going to give us a 30 second countdown.
15:28If you don't want to wait through that, you can just hit enter on the default option Ubuntu.
15:32And since we selected that LVM with encryption option, this is the encryption or decryption
15:37screen.
15:38So it says, please unlock disk dmcrypt0.
15:41Just type in the encryption passphrase that you set up.
15:44I'll type that in and then hit enter.
15:47And it said set up successfully there for a split second.
15:51So after our disk has been decrypted, it's just going to boot like normal right here
15:56to our login screen.
15:58So here you can select your name that you typed in before.
16:00Then type in your user account password that we selected and hit enter.
16:10And that'll log us right in to the Ubuntu desktop.
16:12All right and switching over to the capture card again, this is the first start wizard
16:16that we're going to get when we log in for the first time.
16:19They offer to let us set up Ubuntu Pro, which you can use if you need advanced security
16:23or compliance features.
16:25We're just going to skip that.
16:26Here we have the option to either send in analytics to Canonical to improve Ubuntu or
16:31not share system data.
16:32I'm going to select no.
16:33If you do want to see what would be there if you select yes, you can click on this show
16:36the first report option.
16:38You can see it's really not a ton of data that they're even asking for.
16:41So if you do feel like sending that in, you can go ahead and do that.
16:45And that's the last page of the wizard right here.
16:46They say get started with more applications.
16:48They have a button to open the app center.
16:50I'm going to click finish here just to close that wizard out and now you can start using
16:54the system.
16:55So I'll just show you three quick features that are brand new in Ubuntu 24.04 compared
16:59to older versions.
17:01First of all, we have the GNOME 46 desktop environment, just a new version of our graphical
17:05shell here.
17:06It's got some new tweaks in some of the different GNOME apps like the settings app.
17:10We have a new system section that consolidates a lot of the stuff if you want to go and change
17:14any of those options.
17:15It's funny, GNOME keeps going back and forth between getting rid of settings categories
17:18and then adding them again.
17:19Most of this is stuff we selected in the installer, but we also have things like easy to set up
17:23remote desktop.
17:24Another new feature in Ubuntu 24.04 is the brand new app center.
17:28This is a completely new app store application replacing the one in older versions of Ubuntu.
17:34I've only used it a little bit so far, but it does seem pretty quick compared to the
17:37old one.
17:38It's a decent design and you can just go in here and quickly install any app you may want
17:42to both from the default Ubuntu app repositories and the snap store that Canonical runs.
17:50So you can definitely look through there.
17:51There's like thousands of apps in here.
17:53So again, not going to show you every single one.
17:55New feature number three is something more under the hood.
17:58It's how your network settings are actually stored on disk.
18:01So just to show you this, if I go to Etsy NetPlan right here, NetPlan has been around
18:06on Ubuntu servers for quite a while, but 24.04 is the first time they are unifying it and
18:11actually using that by default on the desktop, not just handing over control to network manager
18:15like it used to, but with NetPlan 1.0 actually integrating with network manager so you can
18:19use it to set up your configuration if you want to.
18:22NetPlan uses a configuration file format called YAML.
18:25It's meant to be a little bit more human readable and more item potent, just a little bit easier
18:29to set up if somebody is doing advanced things with the networking on their system.
18:33But if you're just starting out, you actually don't have to worry about that at all.
18:35All your network settings are just going to be up here in the top right drop down menu
18:39and the settings app if you need to do anything more advanced than that.
18:43So that is how to install Ubuntu 24.04 on your computer.
18:46If you have any questions about using Ubuntu, feel free to leave them in the comment section
18:49below or check out the forums that I have on my website, nerdinthestreet.com.
18:53I've got a section in the forums for tech talk and you are welcome to go in there and
18:57ask any questions you have about using Ubuntu and Linux in general on the desktop.
19:02If you want to help me make more videos, feel free to go to nerdclub.nots.co to support
19:05me.
19:06And if you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe and stay subscribed.
19:08I've been doing this for 12 years and I'd like to make YouTube send me one of those
19:11silver play buttons.
19:12But for now, that's everything I had to show you here.
19:14So I'm Jacob Kaufman, I'm the Nerd in the Street, and I'll see you guys in the next
19:17one.
19:18Bye.