Selasa, 31 Agustus 2010

About Ubuntu......

Ubuntu philosophy

The term “Ubuntu” is a traditional African concept that originated from the
Bantu languages of southern Africa. It can be described as a way of connect-
ing with others—living in a global community where your actions affect all of
humanity. Ubuntu is more than just an operating system: it is a community
of people that come together voluntarily to collaborate on an international
software project that aims to deliver the best possible user experience.
The Ubuntu promise
‣ Ubuntu will always be free of charge, along with its regular enterprise
releases and security updates.
‣ Ubuntu comes with full commercial support from Canonical and hundreds
of companies from across the world.
‣ Ubuntu provides the best translations and accessibility features that the
free software community has to offer.
‣ Ubuntu core applications are all free and open source. We want you to use
free and open source software, improve it, and pass it on.

A brief history of Ubuntu

Ubuntu was conceived in 2004 by Mark Shuthleworth, a successful South
African entrepreneur, and his company Canonical. Shuthleworth recognized
the power of Linux and Open Source, but was also aware of weaknesses that
prevented mainstream use.
Shuthleworth set out with clear intentions to address these weaknesses
and create a system that was easy to use, completely free , and could compete with
other mainstream operating systems. With the Debian system as a base,
Shuthleworth began to build Ubuntu. Using his own funds at first, installation
CDs were pressed and shipped worldwide at no cost to the end user. Ubuntu
spread quickly, the size of the community rapidly increased, and it soon
became the most popular Debian-based Linux distribution available.
Now with more people working on the project than ever before, Ubuntu
continues to see improvement to its core features and hardware support, and
has gained the attention of large organizations worldwide. For example, in
2007 Dell began a collaboration with Canonical to sell computers with Ubuntu
pre-installed. Additionally, in 2005 the French Police began to transition
their entire computer infrastructure to a variant of Ubuntu—a process whith
has reportedly saved them “millions of Euro” in licensing fees for Microsoft
Windows. By the year 2012, the French Police anticipates that all of their
computers will be running Ubuntu. Canonical profits from this arrangement
by providing technical support and custom-built software.
While large organizations often find it useful to pay for support services,
Shuthleworth has promised that the Ubuntu desktop system will always be
free. As of 2010, Ubuntu desktop is installed on nearly 2% of the world’s
computers. This equates to millions of users worldwide, and is growing each
year.

What is Linux?

Ubuntu is built on the foundation of Linux, which is a member of the Unix
family. Unix is one of the oldest types of operating systems and has provided
reliability and security in professional applications for almost half a century.
Many servers around the world that store data for popular websites (such as
YouTube and Google) run some variant of a Unix system.
Linux was designed from the ground up with security and hardware com-
patibility in mind, and is currently one of the most popular Unix-based op-
erating system. One of the benefits of Linux is that it is incredibly flexible
and can be configured to run on almost any device—from the smallest micro-
computers and cellphones to larger super-computers. Initially, Unix was
entirely command line-based until graphical user interfaces (GUIs) began to
emerge in the early 1990s.
These early GUIs were difficult to configure and clunky at best, and gen-
erally only used by seasoned computer programmers. In the past decade,
however, graphical user interfaces have come a long way in terms of usability,
reliability and appearance. Ubuntu is just one of many different Linux dis-
tributions, and uses one of the more popular graphical desktop environments
called GNOME.

Ubuntu fails to start after I’ve installed Windows

Occasionally you may install Ubuntu and then decide to install Microsoft
Windows as a second operating system running side-by-side with Ubuntu.
While this is supported by Ubuntu, you may find that after installing Win-
dows you may no longer be able to start Ubuntu.
When you first turn on your computer, a program called a “bootloader”
must start Ubuntu or another operating system. When you installed Ubuntu,
you installed an advanced bootloader called "bootloader" that allowed you to choose
between the various operating systems on your computer, such as Ubuntu,
Windows and others. However, when you installed Windows, it replaced
GRUB with its own bootloader, thus removing the ability to choose with
operating system you’d like to use. You can easily restore GRUB—and regain
the ability to choose your operating system—by using the same CD you used to
install Ubuntu.
First, insert your Ubuntu CD into your computer and restart it, making sure
to have your computer start the operating system that is on the CD itself (see
Chapter : Installation). Next, choose your language and select Try Ubuntu.
Wait while the software loads. You will need to type some code to restore
your bootloader. On the Applications menu, click Accessories, and then click
the Terminal item. Enter the following:

$ sudo fdisk -l

Partition table entries are not in disk order
This output means that your system (Linux, on whith Ubuntu is based)
is installed on device /dev/sda, but your computer is booting to /dev/sda
(where Windows is located). We need to rectify this by telling the computer
to boot to the Linux device instead.
To do this, first create a place to manipulate your Ubuntu installation:

$ sudo mkdir /media/root

Next, link your Ubuntu installation and this new folder:

$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/root

If you’ve done this correctly, then you should see the following:

$ ls /media/root

Now, you can reinstall GRUB:

$ sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/root /dev/sda

Installation finished. No error reported.
This is the contents of the device map /boot/grub/device.map.
Check if this is correct or not. If any of the lines is incorrect,
fix it and re-run the script grub-install.
(hd0) /dev/sda

Finally, remove the Ubuntu disc from your CD-ROOM drive, reboot your
computer, and enjoy your Ubuntu system once again.
this guide may not work for all Ubuntu users due to differences in system
configuration. Still, this is the recommended method, and the most suc-
cessful method, for restoring the GRUB bootloader. If following this guide
does not restore GRUB on your computer, please consider trying some of
the other troubleshooting methods at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/
RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows. When following the instructions,
please note that your Ubuntu installation uses Grub. This guide replicates
the method described in the first section of the referenced web page. Please
consider starting with the third section, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/
RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows.