Installing Ubuntu 16.04 from USB drive
Follow these instructions and you should have a working Ubuntu system in a short time (Please excuse the picture quality. I have taken each screenshot using a basic smartphone camera):
Before continuing with this guide, please make sure you have a working USB media with Ubuntu installer. You can checkout my earlier blog where I create bootable USB drive with Ubuntu 16.
- Start your system by loading the Boot manager. Each brand of laptops and computers have their own way of loading the boot manager. I am using a Lenovo Yoga-710, which has a pin hole on the left side, next to the headphone jack. The button is called “Novo Button”. I usually use a safety pin to start the system with the boot manager. Most of the other systems I have seen will usually have some combination of keys to press while booting the system to show up the BIOS/UEFI/boot manager menu.
Also, make sure that USB Boot has been enabled in the BIOS Setup.
2. Once the Boot Menu shows up, select the USB drive which has the installer (third option in the following example). The first option is of Windows Boot Manager which came pre-installed with my laptop (and I’ll preserver it). The second option is the Ubuntu boot loader which I installed when I installed Ubuntu for the first time.
4. Select Install Ubuntu.
3. The Ubuntu installer window should launch. Select your preferred language and “Continue”.
4. Connect to the Wi-Fi if you wish to. I would suggest on doing so. This way we can later select to download updates as Ubuntu is being installed.
If you select to connect to a network it will ask you for the password. Once you have entered the password you can select “Continue” to move on to the next step.
5. If you connected to a network you can select to “Download updates while installing Ubuntu”. Personally, I avoid installing third party applications until a specific one is required, so I will leave the next option unchecked.
Click “Continue”.
6. Next options are for Install type. My computer currently has Windows 10 installed on it. I want to get rid of it and have only Ubuntu and utilize my entire 256 GB SSD for computer vision and data science projects. That’s the whole purpose of doing this exercise. (I love Windows but I can’t code on it.)
I select “Something else” so I can make changes to the partitions.
7. Now, you can delete and create new partitions.
I have deleted the only partition I had on my system. Partition deletions and additions can be done using the “-” and “+” buttons beside the “Change” button. Be careful while deleting the partitions because it will not ask you to confirm and will just delete the partitions.
Whatever you delete will show up as ‘free space’ under your hard drive. I only have a single ssd which is indicated as ‘/dev/sda’.
There are 3 partitions which I’ll leave untouched:
sda1 — Windows Boot manager
sda2 — MSR (Reserved)
sda5 — Recovery
I won’t mess with them as I may, later, want to install Windows 10 as well. (There are uses for Windows also).
Let’s create partitions that we’ll require for Ubuntu.
(i) Swap — 16GB (Rule of thumb is swap should be at least as much as your RAM size)
(ii) / — Root, Ext4, rest of the space. This should be your “Primary” partition
You’ll notice a free space of size 0 or 1 MB appear. You can just ignore it.
Select the whole hard disk as “Device for boot loader installation” and not any particular partition.
Select the / root partition and Click “Install Now”.
Installer will ask to confirm the changes to partitions. Click “Continue”.
8. Select the time zone, Keyboard layout and username and password. Click Continue as you move along.
Installation will begin and take a while to complete.
Restart your system when asked to.
And, Voila! Your Ubuntu system is ready.
Congratulations for having a machine ready for starting your journey in coding. Ubuntu comes with Python 2 and 3. So, you are all set.
In the next blog, I will tell how to setup a your Ubuntu machine with CUDA, GPU and Deep Learning and image processing libraries to make it ready for Computer Vision projects.