Ubuntu

Ubuntu is the child of Mark Shuttleworth, millionaire and founder of Canonical. (Oh, and he's been in space and spent 8 days on the ISS.) It's a relatively new distro and has become very popular as it is as easy to maintain as Debian, but far more frequently updated than Debian Stable.

LUG has an Ubuntu mirror at: http://lug.mtu.edu/ubuntu/

Install/Live CD mirror at: http://lug.mtu.edu/iso/ubuntu/

The latest stable version is: Maverick Meerkat

The current development version is: Natty Narwhal

Add Mirror

For Desktop Edition:

1. Go to Applications->Ubuntu Software Center
2. Go to Edit->Software Sources...
3. For Download from: select Other
4. Click on United States
5. Scroll down and select lug.mtu.edu (it's in alphabetical order)
6. Click Choose Server
7. Click Close
8. Click Reload

In Command Line (useful for server edition):

1. Open up /etc/apt/sources.list as sudo
2. Replace all instances of "http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ with "http://lug.mtu.edu/ubuntu/" (example would be in vi/vim, use command ":%s/us.archive.ubuntu.com/lug.mtu.edu/g"
3. Save file
4. run apt-get update

Features

• Debian based
• 6 month release cycle, which is timed shortly after and includes the latest Gnome release
• Releases are supported with security updates for 18 months
• Every 2 years, LTS version is released which is supported for 3 years on desktop and 5 years on server
• Easy to install/use
• Strong user community
• Philosophy of, "If it doesn't work on install, file a bug report about it."
• X.org
• Uses Gnome, but has been forked to use KDE in the Kubuntu project
• The Edubuntu project is based on Ubuntu.