An encounter with Lubuntu

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Finding Lubuntu

Searching with the keyword "lubuntu" might be misleading, so to be safe just search for "ubuntu" and go to their official website. Ubuntu (an ancient African word meaning "humanity to others") is currently published by Canonical, so their name is shown on the top of the official website. After clicking the download menu, links to the official website of several Ubuntu flavors are shown.

Lubuntu is currently listed among several other recognized flavors, which all share the same Ubuntu core packages with different additional set of packages, each providing a distinct experience.

Downloading? Installation?

After navigating to the download page of Lubuntu's official website, generally there are two versions available which are LTS (long-term support) and regular/interim/"non-LTS". The LTS version has approximately three years of Lubuntu Team support and then two years of Ubuntu Community support. Currently, the latest LTS version is code name Focal Fossa which support will end in 2025. One might want to refer to Lubuntu Manual page for a more comprehensive guide and explanation, but listed below are the main focuses which I think are quite important:

  1. Verify downloaded ISO to assure that the downloaded image is authentic and not corrupted.

    2. For Windows 10 users with 7-Zip installed, simply right click on the downloaded ISO, hover on "CRC SHA" and click "SHA-256". I downloaded and verified Lubuntu 20.04.1 LTS (Focal Fossa) in the following example.

    7-zip would launch and the left window would show. After the Checksum calculation finished, the right window would show and display the Checksum information.
    If the Checksum information from 7-zip matches with the SHA256SUMS file of the corresponding Lubuntu version, then the downloaded ISO image is authentic and not corrupted.
  2. Create bootable USB flash drive of the downloaded ISO. The guide in Lubuntu Manual (which hyperlinks to Ubuntu Tutorials website) is clear and straightforward, simply substitute the corresponding ISO with the downloaded Lubuntu image.
  3. Boot to the USB flash drive. This may involve changing some UEFI Firmware Settings which may vary depending on hardware manufacturer.

    4. The old laptop (mentioned on the previous blog) has two options in the Boot Option Menu which are for UEFI and Legacy mode.

    In this example, UEFI Mode is selected.

    This menu would show, select "Start Lubuntu" and hit Enter to continue. This would load a fully-functional Lubuntu OS from the flash drive.
  4. Begin installation. Starting the process is pretty straightforward.
    5. As simple as opening a shortcut on the desktop. How magical.

    Things usually went smoothly up until the "Partitions" screen.

    The wicked "Partitions" screen. "EFI" is written on the top left to indicate the boot mode. If "MBR" is written on the top right, it's better to create a new partition table (thus deleting the current hard drive partitions and all existing data) and create a GPT (GUID Partition Table) but as long as there are no more than four partitions in the final configuration, it should not be a problem. GPT is still preferred, though. In this example, let's go crazy and pick "Manual partitioning".

    After selecting "Manual partitioning", hard drive partitions could be modified. Don't worry, changes are not directly applied to the hard drive before clicking "Next". If, say, Windows 10 is previously installed on the system (which means that the partition table is (most likely) already in GPT), there might be a FAT32 partition with 100MB (1B = 1 byte = 8 bits) in size. This partition is most likely to be the EFI System Partition (ESP). It is among the four (arguably) most essential partitions necessary to install Lubuntu in UEFI mode, which are ESP, root (/), linuxswap file system (swap), and home (/home) partition. To install Lubuntu along with Windows 10, the ESP is usually already there, so the last three partitions are the ones remaining. For this example, to change partition table from MBR to GPT, "New Partition Table" is selected.

    Select GPT then "OK". Once again, MBR partition table might causes problems down the road if there are more than four partitions.

    Create the partitions:

    • preferably starting with EFI System Partition. Double click on the "Free Space", set the size to 100MB, file system to fat32, mount point to /boot/efi, and select boot flag.
    • The rule of thumb for swap partition is twice the RAM capacity, in this case 8GB (8*1024MB = 8192MB) with linuxswap file system and swap flag.
    • For the root partition, (this might be overkill) the size is chosen to be 200GB (200*1024MB = 204800MB), mount point /, and select root flag.
    • Finally home partition with mount point /home.
    Nice and ready to install.

    If Windows 10 is previously installed on the system and ESP is already there:

    Simply double click on the ESP, set the mount point to /boot/efi, and select boot flag. Create the remaining necessary partitions as explained previously.

    If Windows 7 is previously installed on the system and the bootable USB flash drive is booted in Legacy mode to install Lubuntu alongside Windows 7:

    Well, this might be not a popular case but the process is similar. The only difference is there are no ESP, so the boot loader installation location has to be set after creating the necessary partitions.

    "BIOS" is shown instead of "EFI" on the top left corner to indicate Legacy boot.
    Set the boot loader to be installed on System Partition (/). I have tried this and it should not cause any harm with Windows Boot Manager.

    After the partitions are configured, the remaining installation steps should be going smoothly.

What now?

Lubuntu is finally installed! In the subsequent blog, I shall discuss about familiarizing with Lubuntu interface and preparing Lubuntu for learning Python.