Contents

Nothing I have ever written would have been possible without the love, support, and infinite patience of Dorothy Fisher, my wife and best friend. Dorth believed in me on day one, removed several thousand commas from my earliest writing, and has accepted “I can’t do that now— come back in fifteen minutes or six hours” as an excuse more times than anyone should ever be expected to. I am similarly lucky to have great friends like Jeff “Sunshine” Kaminski, Dr. Joe O’Lear, Jim Morgan, and Kim Walter in my life. I heard once that a good friend will come and bail you out of jail, but a true friend will be sitting in jail with you saying, “Man! That was fun!” Luckily, we haven’t had to test that, but I’m sure we’d all look great in orange.

I would also like to thank Carol Long, Tom Dinse, Kit Kemper, and others at Wiley who enabled me to do this book and supported me during its creation. All errors are mine alone, but this would be a much weaker book without your contributions. I quite literally wouldn’t have been able to do it without you. Finally, this book wouldn’t even exist without people like Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttle worth, the Ubuntu folks in general, the Debian Project, Richard Stallman, the FSF, and the millions of contributors to the cornucopia that is GNU/Linux.

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A Linux distribution is basically the sum of the things that you need to run Linux on your computer. There are many different Linux distributions, each with their own target audience, set of features, administrative tools, and fan club, the latter of which is more properly known as a user community. Putting aside the downright fanatics, most of the members of the user community for any Linux distribution are people who just happen to find themselves using a distribution for one reason or another. These reasons range from what they’ve heard from friends, what CD or DVD came with a Linux magazine that they bought; to what Linux book they happened to buy. Ubuntu Linux is the most exciting Linux distribution in years. Ironically, while Ubuntu itself is indeed new, it also comes with a respectable Linux pedigree. Ubuntu has direct roots in one of the oldest and best-known Linux distributions available, the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. The folks who initially created and supported Ubuntu, Canonical Ltd., started out as Debian fans who wanted a faster-moving,

more up-to-date distribution than Debian provided. So, in the spirit of Linux and the Open Source movement, they made their own distribution, Ubuntu Linux, by incorporating the best of Debian, other Linux distributions and open source applications, and added their own special sauce.

Ubuntu means “humanity to others.” For the people who use and bring you Ubuntu Linux, this is not just a name with touchy-feely overtones. The special sauce in Ubuntu is a social and business commitment to Ubuntu users everywhere. Ubuntu releases occur regularly, every six months, and support and updates for any Ubuntu release are available for a minimum of eighteen months after that. More about that it in the first chapter, where you’ll read more about Ubuntu, its philosophy, its community, and why the sum of those makes Ubuntu different than any other Linux distribution.

In a nutshell, Ubuntu is a Linux distribution for people. While reading this book, you’ll see that there are plenty of excellent technical reasons for using Ubuntu, even if you’re a hard-core Linux propeller head. However, that’s not the point of Ubuntu—Ubuntu is for people who want to use their computers and need a solid software foundation for doing so. Whether your focus is on writing code or surfing the Web, sending and receiving electronic mail, working with your digital photographs, watching DVDs, listening to music, and so on, Ubuntu offers the software that you need to do what you want to do.

Like any Linux distribution, you can freely download and install Ubuntu, but it gets even better. This book includes a CD of the latest Ubuntu Desktop CD at the time this book was published, but new versions may be available by the time you buy the book. If you don’t have access to a CD burner, need a version of Ubuntu for a non-x86 system, or simply don’t have the time, the Ubuntu folks will send you CDs that you can either use to install or test-drive Ubuntu on your current computer system. That’s more than free—it’s revolutionary! Downloadable copies of Linux distributions are nothing new, but sending people physical CDs if they need them shows that Ubuntu Linux is more than just another Linux distribution— the Ubuntu folks are Linux devotees on a mission. And you and I are the lucky winners.

Who Should Read This Book

If you’re reading this in a bookstore and are unsure which Linux distribution to get started with, or whether to use Linux at all, this book is for you. Ubuntu is a complete, visually friendly, and community-oriented distribution that makes it easy for you to get started using Linux. Ubuntu is designed to be a distribution for users, but as you’ll see throughout this book, you can do anything that you want with it, from running your desktop to running servers and network services for the enterprise, thanks to the inherent power of Linux. Ubuntu comes with a tremendous selection of up-to-date software, and plenty more is quickly downloaded and installed thanks to its easy-to-use administrative tools. Ubuntu is frequently updated, and there is no such thing as a Linux virus or “accidentally-installed spyware.” Linux is inherently secure.

Ubuntu’s rich user community is a big win for new and existing Ubuntu users. There are places to ask questions and actually get answers. People seem to want to help. The Ubuntu forums and mailing lists are a live, constant demonstration of the philosophical and social aspects of Ubuntu, which are discussed in Chapter 1.

In a nutshell, every Linux distribution has fans, devotees, forums, and mailing lists, but Ubuntu’s are the most exciting, usable, and useful that I’ve ever seen in my years of using Linux. You can feel the excitement.

Ubuntu brings the promise of Internationalization alive—you can get versions of Ubuntu for many languages and character sets, and more are actively on the way.

If you’re already using Ubuntu, this book should be equally useful to you because it explains how to use the standard applications provided with Ubuntu, how to do common system configuration and system administration tasks, and so on. If you’re already using Ubuntu on your desktop and do more with it, this book clearly explains how to install common servers for file-sharing, electronic mail handling, Web servers, and much more.

How This Book Is Organized

Ubuntu Linux Bible is organized into four parts.

Part I: Getting Started with Ubuntu Linux

The first part of this book provides background information about Ubuntu Linux, including instructions on installing it on your machine or simply taking it for a test drive from a Live CD. Chapter 1 introduces Ubuntu, the Ubuntu philosophy, and explores the Ubuntu community and the various Web sites where you can get information and assistance in using and configuring Ubuntu (if you need help NOW, rather than simply reading this book). Chapter 1 also discusses some of the main reasons why Ubuntu is the right Linux distribution to use, and compares its capabilities against several other popular Linux distributions.

Chapter 2 explains how to install Ubuntu as your only operating system or as an alternate operating system on an existing computer system if you can’t live without whatever you’re already using. Chapter 3 explains how to experiment with Ubuntu even if you don’t have a computer system or disk space to spare, thanks to the freely downloadable Ubuntu Live distribution, which boots on any modern PC but doesn’t require any changes to that system.

Part II: Ubuntu for Desktop Users

Part II explores the rich set of applications that are available for Ubuntu and explains how to use them to accomplish the kinds of things that people use modern personal computers for—reading and sending e-mail; surfing the Web; creating documents and spreadsheets; playing games; and playing and managing audio CDs, online music files, and DVD movies. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 provide a basic discussion of Linux and Unix fundamentals if you are curious about using a command line, give you an overview of the graphical user interface provided by Ubuntu, and generally explain how things are organized on your Ubuntu system.

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Introduction

Chapters 7 through 14 are task-oriented discussions of common tasks, such as editing files, reading and sending mail, surfing the Web, printing things, working with multimedia, spreadsheets, presentations, and so on. Chapters 15 and 16 discuss how to share and transfer files with other computer systems that are on your local network or anywhere on the Internet. Chapter 17 focuses on how to connect your Ubuntu system to your PDA and share and synchronize information. This part concludes with Chapter 18’s discussion of application development on Ubuntu, highlighting standard GNU/Linux development tools such as compilers, automatic build tools, graphical Integrated Development Environments, and source code control systems.

All of which are free, of course.

Part III: Ubuntu for System Administrators

Anyone who sets up their computer to connect to the network, enable users to log in, and so on is an official junior system administrator as far as I’m concerned. This part explains how to do all of the system administration tasks that any home user will want to do, but also explores all of the system administration tasks that you or any other administrator will need to do when using Ubuntu in a business setting. This section explains what actually happens when your Ubuntu system boots, introduces how Linux systems help you protect your personal files and directories, and discusses ways of backing up and restoring files. Chapter 19 discusses the Linux boot process in detail to help you incorporate new procedures into the boot process and

make it easier for you to diagnose problems if they occur. Chapter 20 tells you how to keep your system up to-date and how to locate and install new software. Chapter 21 discusses standard (users and groups) and advanced (ACLs) security on your Ubuntu system, in terms of both protecting files from unauthorized access and maximizing file sharing. Chapter 22 discusses how to back up your existing system so that you can safeguard your important projects and easily restore accidentally deleted files. Chapter 23 explains how to add new hardware to your Ubuntu system if you run out of space, need faster graphics, or need anything to upgrade your machine. Chapter 24 discusses network security and how to protect yourself from crackers and other local or network vandals. This part concludes with Chapter 25, which explains how to use

Ubuntu on laptops, other wireless systems, and with common wireless devices such as keyboards, mice, and even headphones.

Part IV: Configuring Servers on Ubuntu

Part IV discusses how to set up servers that provide basic network and Internet services on any network that you’re connected to. Separate chapters discuss how to set up a Web server, select and configure a mail server, use your Ubuntu system as a centralized print server, provide basic file-sharing and print services to

Microsoft Windows systems on your network, and set up servers such as DNS, DHCP, and NFS.

Conventions Used in This Book

Many different organizational and typographical features throughout this book are designed to help you get the most of the information.

Whenever the authors want to bring something important to your attention the information will appear in a Caution, Note, Tip, or Warning.

This information is important and is set off in a separate paragraph with a special icon. Cautions provide information about things to watch out for, whether simply inconvenient or potentially hazardous to your data or systems.

CAUTIION

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