Screenshot Guide: Install Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus

Step 11: Home Directory Encryption

Generally speaking, you do not have to encrypt your home directory. But you may do so if you want to.

Step 12: Confirm Timezone

The installer should automatically pick your timezone. Confirm the choice and move forward.

Step 13: Ubuntu Server Drive Partitioning

This is one of the key steps and probably most complicated of all steps. We will have a separate partitioning guide shortly. For now, ensure that you have at least 8GB (headless – no desktop environment) or 10 GB (with desktop environment) of space. In this guide we are going to assume that the homeserver has 2 physical hard disks (sda and sdb). sda is the drive that will be formatted for Ubuntu Server 16.04 installation. sdb is a storage drive containing all media collection (will not be formatted). Choose Manual partitioning method and proceed.

My recommendation is to create a separate /home partition and put everything else under /. The reason I suggest this is that almost all customizations are saved in home partition. They will be saved if you decide to reinstall OS for some reason. Furthermore, if you use AtoMiC ToolKit to setup home server apps such as CouchPotato, SABnzbd, SickBeard, etc. then those apps are installed in /home partition. These will be preserved between reinstall and OS upgrades. If you decide to do this, then I suggest about 10 GB for OS / and the rest of the disk for /home where all your data will be stored. Also create about 2 GB of Swap partition (will be used as backup RAM for server). Once again, all these will be explained in detail in my upcoming partitioning guide.

Step 14: Confirm Partition Scheme

Once you have setup a partitioning scheme, the installer will show you a preview of the partition scheme. Confirm and continue to create the partitions. As explained before, in this example we are creating one primary partition of 10 GB that will contain the OS (/ folder), rest of the space on the hard disk minus ~2 GB for /home partition, and the final ~2 GB for Linux swap partition. This is shown in the picture below.

In the picture above, /home partition is only 20 GB. In reality, this would be the total hard disk capacity minus space used for / partition and swap partition. Also, second hard disk containing media files would much larger than 5.4 GB shown above. Note that hard disk 1 (sda) with 3 new partitions shows “f” (to be formatted) and hard disk 2 (sdb) with one existing partition shows “K” (to be kept / not to be formatted). Ensure that the drive containing your media files is set to “K” as shown above.

Step 15: Write the Partitions to Disk

Because partitioning is critical, you will be asked one more time to confirm before partitions will be written to the hard disk.

The above picture shows only 2 partitions (/ and swap). For the partition scheme shown in previous step you will see 3 partition (/, /home, and swap) listed for creation.

Step 16: Base Ubuntu 16.04 Server Installation

After partitioning, the installer continue to install Ubuntu Server 16.04 base system. Nothing to do here than wait for it to complete.

Step 17: Setup HTTP Proxy

In typical Ubuntu Home Server setup, this is generally not needed. So, leave it blank and continue to install Ubuntu 16.04 Server.

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Step 18: APT Repository Configuration

Ubuntu software are installed from the APT repository. Wait for the installer to configure it.

Step 19: Setup Automatic Updates

Ubuntu Server can automatically install updates when they are available. While this can break things sometimes installing just the security updates shouldn’t. So I recommend installing security updates automatically on your Ubuntu home server.

When non-security updates are available, you will see a notification upon login and you can force an update using sudo apt-get upgrade command.

Continue to page 3 of Ubuntu Server 16.04 setup guide…