There is a new version of this tutorial available for Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish).

How to install Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) Minimal Server

This tutorial shows the installation of a Ubuntu 17.10 minimal server in detail with many screenshots. The purpose of the guide is to show the basic installation of Ubuntu Artful Aardvark that can be used as a basis for the other Ubuntu tutorials here at howtoforge like our perfect server guides. This tutorial uses the non-LTS branch which contains the latest software versions. If you prefer to get longtime supported software versions, then please use this guide for Ubuntu LTS instead.

1. Requirements

To install a Ubuntu Server, you will need the following prerequisites:

2. Preliminary Note

In this tutorial, I use the hostname server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.1.100 and the gateway 192.168.1.1 These settings might differ for you, so you have to replace them where appropriate.

In many cases, you might not need the latest software for a server but prefer to get updates for a longer time. In that case, use the Ubuntu LTS version instead of the latest Ubuntu release. You can find this tutorial for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS here.

3. The Base System

Insert the Ubuntu install CD / DVD into your system and boot from it. When you install the OS in a virtual machine like I will do it here, then you should be able to select the downloaded ISO file as source for the CD/DVD drive in VMWare and Virtualbox without burning it on CD first.

The first screen will show the language selector. Please select your language for the installation process:

Select the language for the Ubuntu 17.10 installation process.

Then choose the option Install Ubuntu Server:

Start the Ubuntu installation.

Select your language again, this time the language is for the installed Ubuntu OS:

Select the language that is used for the OS

Then choose your location. The location settings are important for the keyboard layout, locale and timezone of your server:

Choose the server location.

Select your region.

Select your country.

Select the server locale.

Choose a keyboard layout: You have the option to let the Ubuntu installer detect the keyboard layout automatically by choosing "yes" here. I prefer to select the right keyboard from a list and therefore, I choose No & keyboard layout as German:

Select the keyboard layout manually.

Select the country for the Ubuntu keyboard locale.

Select the keyboard layout.

The installer checks the installation CD, your hardware, and configures the network with DHCP if there is a DHCP server in the network:

The installer scans the CD image for packages.

Enter the hostname of the system. In this example, my server is named server1.example.com, so I enter server1.example.com:

Set the server hostname.


Ubuntu does not let you log in as root user directly. Therefore, we create a new system user here for the initial login. I will create a user with the name Administrator and user name administrator (don't use the user name admin as it is a reserved name on Ubuntu Linux):

Set the full name of the user.

Set a username.

Choose a password:

Choose a password

Repeat the password

I don't need an encrypted private directory, so I choose No here:

Encryption of the home directory is not required here

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By: H.Z.
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I have an other question: WHY to install a non-LTS based Ubuntu server?

By: till
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This question is answered in the first part of the tutorial already. Users that need latest software versions will install non-LTS versions. You might need this e.g. when you want to use a software that needs latest versions as dependencies or when you develop software and want to make your software compatible with latest software versions etc.

By: H.Z.
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 You could be right, but...

If I were a developer, then I'd like to install latest software into an lxc/docker(?) container instead of installing a full OS, which could be really instable... (IMHO)

 

By: till
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This setup is for virtual machines as well and not just full servers. I'm a developer and I use the exact setup from above (and it's predecessors that I wrote in the past years) daily for development and software testing in a VMware VM, others might use VirtualBox, KVM or whatever, the above setup applies to all of them. For some cases one might use Docker as well, but depending on the software that you write, the software might behave differently inside a docker container than on a real system, so using a virtualization system that is able to fully virtualize a server is often a better choice. Using a non-LTS version might not be the right thing for you, but many others need it and that's why we publish a tutorial on that topic. Besides that, you can find a link to the LTS version of this guide in the first chapter.

By: C.Z
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If i want to use this setup and will be hosting more than one website on my server what should i use as the hostname for this system and what domain should i use. Do i use the domain of one of the websites i plan to host on this system or do i just make one up. i have myfirstwebsite.com and mysecondwebsite.ca for the hostname can i use serv1 and domian as webserver.com or do i have to use myfirstwebsite.com

By: till
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Use a subdomain of one of your sites or any other domain you own. e.g. srv1.yourdomain.tld. The only thing that matters is that the subdomain that you use as hostname exists in DNS and points to this server.