Now that we've seen how Windows is installed, let's go ahead and install the Linux operating system. Remember how I said that Linux has many different versions of their operating system called distributions? There are countless articles that highlights the pros and cons of the hundreds of distributions out there. We'll go with the most popular consumer distribution, Ubuntu. I've already loaded Ubuntu on a plain USB drive. ProTip: Since Ubuntu is open source, you can download the free operating system install image directly from their website and install it using whatever media you like. I've included a link to it in the next supplemental reading. I should also call out that you can't just copy the install file to a USB drive and expect it to work. It has to be copied in a way that makes a USB device bootable from our BIOS. To load the image onto your USB device and make it bootable, you can use a tool like etcher.io. You can also check out the link to the tool in the reading right after this video. Okay. Let me go power on. And remember, we're gonna make sure that we want to boot from the USB device. All right. Now that its loaded, you'll see an option if you want to try using the operating system first or just install the operating system. We're going to do a fresh install the operating system. The Ubuntu logo will pop up, and then we're going to have to go through a couple of loading screens while the system is installing. All right. We're just going to go ahead and skip through all of these and just pick the defaults for now. All right. Now it ask us for our name, a computer name, or host name, then a username. The host name is used to identify the computer when it needs to talk to other computers. On our personal computer, it's common to just use our own names for our computer's name. But in an IT organization, we want to choose a good host name that follows a certain standardization. We'll go over that in a later lesson, but for now, let's just use an industry standard for host name, like user name dash location. So I'm going to go and enter in my name, Cindy. Then, for the host name field, I'm going to type cindy-nyc. Then for the password, we're just going to enter a password here, then we're going to confirm. All right. Then, I'm going to hit next. And then it'll ask us to restart once it's done. Awesome. Now that's restarted, let's go ahead and log in. Great. Now we're in the Ubuntu desktop environment. Here you can see where applications are laid out. On the left-hand side here, we have a dock that we can add shortcuts to. This layout may change since Ubuntu is changing their desktop environment in the near future. To learn more about this, you can check out the next supplemental reading. On the top right-hand bar here, you'll see quick settings for your computer, like network connectivity, Bluetooth connectivity, sound and volume. There's also the time, a menu to power off, restart, sleep, and log out of your machine. Let's click on this menu and select "System Settings." From here, you can change your system settings, like your screensaver, resolution, hardware settings, and more. Let's go back to our desktop and select this icon here for files. This opens up a window so we can view our files. You can see the different files and folders here. If I click on "Computer", I'm taken to the main directory of my system. We're going to get to this in-depth in the later course. So for now, I'm going to head back to my desktop. Now, let's do the exact same thing we did with our windows machine and create a file. This time, let's just use commands in the shell. Because we're in a GUI, we don't have a program called Bash that we run our commands in. Instead, we open up the search utility here and search for an application called Terminal. When you open up the Terminal, you'll see your username, and at symbol, the host name, colon, tilde, and then slash desktop as your command prompt. This is used to show who's running the command. This will be more important in another course as you switch users. The last portion of the prompt shows you where you are on the computer. We'll learn more about this in a later lesson too. But you can see that we're currently in our desktop. You can verify that we're using the Bash shell with a simple command: echo dollar sign, SHELL. The echo command just prints out text options to the display. In this case, the argument ''dollar sign SHELL'' is the current shell, slash bin, slash bash or bash. You could even do ''echo Hello'', and it would display Hello, which isn't as useful. Okay. Let's create a file in our shell. I'm going to use the touch command. Touch my_super_cool_file. And here, you can see it made a file on our desktop. There are many different commands you can use to make a file, but the touch command in one of the simpler ones. Right now, it might be hard to understand why you have to memorize Linux shell commands when it's easier to use a Windows GUI. If you'd be working with any Linux machines, it's essential that you know these commands. Learning commands is also a stepping stone to process automation, which we'll cover in another course. Don't worry, by the end of this program, you should be super comfortable in the shell. Maybe you'll even run commands faster than you can in the GUI.
