Download the latest Ubuntu LTS

The Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) version is released every two years, on April; and it is supported for five years. So this version has to be super stable, it’s what most of our users have installed in their machines, and it often gets security fixes and some other stable release updates.

All of this means that it always needs to be tested, and by as many hands and on as many different machines as possible. If you want to start helping the Ubuntu community, I would suggest that testing the latest LTS is the place to start. There will be so many people around the world that will be positively affected by this work, and all of them will sincerely appreciate it. Well... not all of them, but most of them for sure :) I for one will invite you to a beer when you come for holidays to Costa Rica.

While testing Ubuntu you will learn about the many different aspects that build a free operating system. Then you can jump to collaborate in other areas that pique your interest, like support, programming, translations, packaging, planning, partying, etc. Or you can stay helping with the tests, maybe in some more unstable and rapidly changing projects.

This is the first post of a series I will write about contributing to different areas of Ubuntu. They will focus mostly on testing because that’s what I enjoy the most. And in addition, we will meet live every Friday on Ubuntu On-Air to explore cool free software projects and help the developers on their way to a stable release.

Let’s begin. The first thing you will have to do if you want to join our community is to download Ubuntu. To do that open your browser and go to https://www.ubuntu.com/download

Click the Ubuntu Desktop link, or the download button next to it.

There are other different versions of Ubuntu. Newer and older releases, different user interface flavors, smaller versions for servers and connected devices, and some for specific phones and tablets. We will see some of them in following posts and meetings, but for now we will start with the basic and most common.

The next step shows you the recommended requirements that a machine should meet to run this Ubuntu version properly. Make sure that you have all of them and click the Download button.

This opens a page for optional donations. If you feel generous, you can give some money to the community and decide where it should be spent. If you can’t or don’t want to give any money, no problem, just click the link that says: Not now, take me to the download. Beers, hugs, bugs are all valid payment methods too.

And that’s it. A dialog should appear offering you to download the file. Make sure to choose the option to save it into your disk, and take into account that if you use a different browser than mine, your dialog might look different.

This was a first simple step. If it was too simple for you, don’t worry, next time we will do a few more complicated things. If on the other hand you got lost somewhere, also don’t worry because we will be around to answer any kind of doubts.

In both cases, come and join us next Friday, November 25th at 18:00 UTC on our first Ubuntu Testing Day! We will use this image to test the awesome Nextcloud snap. Kyle Fazarri has been making some great work to package Nextcloud for everybody, and he will be joining us to show off and answer questions.