Obtaining installation media

It’s time to get started! If you’ve decided to utilize a physical server, desktop, laptop, or VM as your test server, then you’ll need to go through the installation process to set up Ubuntu. Don’t worry—it’s very easy to do and it might even be easier than you’d think, as there are fewer overall steps in the process when compared to older versions. If you’ve instead opted to use a VPS or Raspberry Pi, you won’t need to go through this process, as VPS providers do this for you and Raspberry Pi has a different setup method altogether (we’ll cover this later in the chapter, in the Installing Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi section).

Assuming that you’ve decided to use a device that does require going through the installer, we’ll need to download Ubuntu Server and then create bootable installation media to install it. How you do this largely depends on your hardware. Does your...