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Ubuntu is also available as a so-called “live system” for certain architectures. A live system is a preconfigured ready-to-use system in a compressed format that can be booted and used from a read- only medium like a CD, DVD or USB drive. Using it by default does not create any permanent changes on your computer. You can change user settings and install additional programs from within the live system, but all this only happens in the computer’s RAM, i.e. if you turn off the computer and boot the live system again or if you restart the system, everything is reset to its defaults. If you want to see whether your hardware is supported by Ubuntu, the easiest way is to run a Ubuntu live system on it and try it out.
There are a few limitations in using a live system. The first is that as all changes you do within the live system must be held in your computer’s RAM, this only works on systems with enough RAM to do that, so installing additional large software packages may fail due to memory constraints. An- other limitation with regards to hardware compatibility testing is that the official Ubuntu live system contains only free components, i.e. there are no non-free firmware files included in it. Such non-free packages can of course be installed manually within the system, but there is no automatic detection of required firmware files like in the debian-installer, so installation of non-free components must be done manually if needed.
Information about the available variants of the Ubuntu live images can be found at the download web page (http://www.ubuntu.com/download/).