Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a new desktop distribution, based on Debian, and features many Debian people in its lineup. Almost all instructions intended for Debian work on Ubuntu.

It is aimed at non-technical desktop users, and everything "just works". The team are committed to 6-monthly release cycles.

By default, it takes the whole disk for a single partition, but this can be changed. Underneath the Gnome desktop that is installed by default is a well-supported "main" distribution of packages, and also available is an unsupported "universe" of pretty much everything that you'd find in Debian itself.

The installer is well done, and the user experience is clean and simple. Recommended!

There are multiple package repositories available with Ubuntu, and as soon as someone says "where's package nnn?" the answer is "in 'universe'". But what's that?

• 'main' is "all of Ubuntu" - everything that has been checked and amended to work "properly" and has been integrated with each other, and has a Free license.
• 'restricted' is "Ubuntu components with non-Free licensing" - like the nVidia display drivers. 'main' provides the open source 'nv' driver, but 'restricted' provides nVidia's own driver for full 3d acceleration and so on - but that's binary-only.
• 'universe' is "everything from Debian unstable at date xxxx" which proves it can at least compile under Ubuntu, and so can it's dependancies. These packages are not integrated - e.g. they might try to use 'su' to get root privs, which does not work under default Ubuntu.
• 'multiverse' is "everything that compiles", even where it's dependancies have failed.

So, a true Ubuntu system consists only of 'main'. For a newbie, it's better to leave only 'main' enabled, and put up with the unavailability of some packages. This guarantees that everything they might use is fully supported and integrated.

Different Ubuntu versions are labelled with numbers along with animals of varying disposition.