How to Install Ubuntu on Your Server

Download the Ubuntu (currently at version 7.04, “Feisty Fawn”) Server CD image from Ubuntu’s download page.

2. Making the installation CD

Burn the ubuntu-7.04-server-i386.iso image to a CD using your favorite image-burning program. Remember, burn the image; do not extract the files from the image file. If you are going to be using an old CD-ROM, burn the CD at the slowest possible speed, for reliability.

3. Installing Ubuntu on Your Server

Ubuntu is well known for having an easy installation process. For now, plug in a monitor, keyboard, and the network cables (Internet and LAN, both), put in the Ubuntu server CD, and boot up! You may need to change your BIOS settings to allow booting from CD.

1. Select the hard disk installation, choose your desired language, then pick your country and keyboard.
2. Configure the network interface connected to the Internet, using one of 3 options: autoconfiguration, autoconfiguration with DHCP (automatically assigned IP addresses), or manual. Which one you choose really depends on your Internet connection; ask your ISP, if in doubt. If you have to configure manually, configure your Internet connection on the eth0 network card, for simplicity’s sake.
3. For partitioning, I recommend “Guided - use entire disk”, as it is a no-brainer, and accept the settings, thereby writing changes to disk.
4. Allow the system clock to be set to UTC.
5. Create the system administrator’s user account; enter the full user name, account name, and administrator’s password (which has to be verified).
6. Ubuntu will continue to install the base system.
7. Enter your ISP’s proxy server settings, if required.
8. When you are asked to choose the software to install, select both DNS and LAMP server. You do this using the spacebar to check the boxes, cursor keys, and TAB, to navigate through the menu.
9. Complete the installation, reboot, and you will be presented with a command-line interface (CLI) prompting you to log in. Use the administrator account name and password to do so.

Before we continue, I did mention that I would try to make this as simple as possible, and now you are probably wondering what you are doing in a CLI. This is necessary, as we want our server to run as lean as possible. After all, it is going to be stowed away in a closet, so who needs a fancy GUI? I promise we won’t be spending much longer on the CLI. A couple of tips for new users:

• the cursor keys let you scroll through previous commands you entered,
• the TAB key is a God-send for its auto-complete function. Type a couple of keys, hit the TAB key, and it will auto-complete or show you the valid commands or paths!

4. Checking Internet connectivity

First thing we will do on our new system is to check if we are connected to the Internet. Do this simply by pinging Google.

ping www.google.comStop the pinging with Ctrl+C. If all went well, you should be getting responses to your pings. If not, try switching the LAN and Internet cables around. Most probably, you will get a ping response by now. Keep in mind which card your Internet is configured on, eth0 or eth1, and modify the instructions accordingly. In this guide, the Internet is on eth0 and the LAN is on eth1.

5. LAN network configuration

Now, we will configure our LAN network card. We will do this using vim, a CLI text editor.

Four simple commands you will use in vim are:

• the I key, which will put you in Insert mode so you can edit the text file as in any other text editor,
• the Esc key, which exits you out of the Insert mode,
• :w!, which saves/writes the file to disk,
• :x, which exits the vim text editor.

Let us open our network configuration file with administrative privileges:

sudo vim /etc/network/interfacesYou will be asked to enter the administrator’s password. Navigate with the cursor key and add the following at the end of this file:

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
	address 192.168.0.1
	netmask 255.255.255.0
	broadcast 192.168.0.255

If you need to change the configuration of your Internet connection, you should do this now in the eth0 section. Restart your network interfaces using:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Thanks to http://techgurulive.com/2009/04/06/how-to-install-ubuntu-on-your-server/