Translations by Cheng-Chia Tseng

ubuntu-doc@lists.ubuntu.com (Ubuntu Documentation Project)

About Ubuntu

Ubuntu - Linux for Human Beings!

This document is maintained by the Ubuntu documentation team (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam). For a list of contributors, see the <ulink url="../../libs/C/contributors.xml">contributors page</ulink>

Ubuntu Documentation Project

Ubuntu will always be free of charge, and there is no extra fee for the "enterprise edition"; we make our very best work available to everyone on the same Free terms.

Ubuntu is entirely committed to the principles of open source software development; we encourage people to use open source software, improve it and pass it on.

Ubuntu is an entirely open source operating system built around the <emphasis>Linux</emphasis> kernel. The Ubuntu community is built around the ideals enshrined in the <ulink url="http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/philosophy">Ubuntu Philosophy</ulink>: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customize and alter their software in whatever way they see fit. For those reasons: <placeholder-1/>

Ubuntu is a South African ethical ideology focusing on people's allegiances and relations with each other. The word comes from the Zulu and Xhosa languages. Ubuntu is seen as a traditional African concept, is regarded as one of the founding principles of the new republic of South Africa and is connected to the idea of an African Renaissance.

A rough translation of the principle of Ubuntu is "humanity towards others". Another translation could be: "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity".

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed."

As a platform based on Free software, the Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of ubuntu to the software world.

"Free software" doesn't mean that you shouldn't have to pay for it (although Ubuntu is committed to being free of charge as well). It means that you should be able to use the software in any way you wish: the code that makes up free software is available for anyone to download, change, fix, and use in any way. Alongside ideological benefits, this freedom also has technical advantages: when programs are developed, the hard work of others can be used and built upon. With non-free software, this cannot happen and when programs are developed, they have to start from scratch. For this reason the development of free software is fast, efficient and exciting!

You can find out more about free software and the ideological and technical philosophy behind it at the <ulink url="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/">GNU website</ulink>.

By focusing on quality, Ubuntu produces a robust and feature-rich computing environment that is suitable for use in both home and commercial environments. The project takes the time required to focus on finer details and is able to release a version featuring the latest and greatest of today's software once every 6 months. Ubuntu is available in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, and will run on most modern computers. It is also available for the Sun UltraSPARC and Amazon EC2 architectures.

The desktop is what you see after you log in to your computer and what you use to manage and run applications. The default desktop environment for Ubuntu is <ulink url="http://www.gnome.org/">GNOME</ulink>, a leading UNIX and Linux desktop suite and development platform.

Backing and Support

Canonical Ltd. also sponsors a number of other Open Source software projects, about which more information can be found on the <ulink url="http://www.canonical.com">Canonical website</ulink>.

A new version of Ubuntu is released every 6 months; the Update Manager should inform you when a new version is available for download. To check for a new version:

Open Software Sources (<menuchoice><guimenu>System</guimenu><guimenuitem>Administration</guimenuitem><guimenuitem>Software Sources</guimenuitem></menuchoice>) and select the <guilabel>Updates</guilabel> tab.

Under <guilabel>Release upgrade</guilabel>, make sure that <guilabel>Normal releases</guilabel> is selected and click <guibutton>Close</guibutton>.

Open the Update Manager (<menuchoice><guimenu>System</guimenu><guimenuitem>Administration</guimenuitem><guimenuitem>Update Manager</guimenuitem></menuchoice>), click <guibutton>Check</guibutton> and enter your password if prompted. Wait for the list of available updates to be downloaded.

If a new version of Ubuntu is available, a box at the top of the window will appear saying that a new distribution release is available.

To upgrade to the latest release, save all of your open documents and click the <guibutton>Upgrade</guibutton> button in the Update Manager.

Upgrades usually take a while to complete. Typically, around 700MB of packages must be downloaded and installed, although the actual figure will depend on how many packages are already installed on your computer.

You can only upgrade to the latest Ubuntu release if you are running the second most recent release. If you have an older release, you must upgrade to the next release after that, and so on until you are running the most recent version. For example, users of version 7.10 would first have to upgrade to version 8.04 before upgrading to version 8.10. An exception to this rule is with LTS (Long Term Support) releases. You can upgrade directly from the previous LTS release to the current release.

Upgrading to a development release

If you would like to install and test the latest development version of Ubuntu before it is released, press <keycombo><keycap>Alt</keycap><keycap>F2</keycap></keycombo>, type <userinput>update-manager -c -d</userinput> into the box and click <guibutton>Run</guibutton>. If a development release is available, an <guibutton>Update</guibutton> button will appear in the Update Manager. Click it to upgrade to the development version.

Development releases often suffer from package breakages and other problems. Only install a development release if you are prepared to attempt to fix these problems for yourself.

The <ulink url="http://www.kernel.org">Linux kernel</ulink> is the heart of the Ubuntu operating system. A kernel is an important part of any operating system, providing the communication bridge between hardware and software.

Linux was brought to life in 1991 by a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds. At the time, it would run only on i386 systems, and was essentially an independently-created clone of the UNIX kernel, intended to take advantage of the then-new i386 architecture.

Nowadays, thanks to a substantial amount of development effort by people all around the world, Linux runs on virtually every modern computer architecture.

The Linux kernel has gained an ideological importance as well as a technical one. There is an entire community of people who believe in the ideals of free software and spend their time helping to make open source technology as good as it can be.

People in this community gave rise to initiatives such as Ubuntu, standards committees that shape the development of the Internet, organizations like the Mozilla Foundation, responsible for creating Mozilla Firefox, and countless other software projects from which you've almost certainly benefited in the past.

The spirit of open source, commonly attributed to Linux, is influencing software developers and users everywhere to drive communities with common goals.

The <emphasis>GNU Project</emphasis> was launched in January 1984 by Richard Stallman, to develop a complete UNIX-style operating system which is comprised of free software: the GNU system. Variants of the GNU operating system, which use the Linux kernel, are now widely used.

The GNU project is closely linked to the philosophy of free software, which is central to the projects that derive from it, such as Ubuntu. The concept of free software is explained at <xref linkend="free-software"/>.

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