Burning a dvd from the password protected download
 

Hi , another newbie here, when my old media center computer lost the ability to boot up i thought it might be a good idea to try a linux distro on it and after succsessfully installing mint 14 with mate d/e I felt quite liberated , now i was never that great with the old xp just your average self taught casual user .
Of course being quite new to linux i thought i might try a couple of new distos , one of which was zorin 7 ultimate which is password protected , once you've made the olbligatory donation the password is sent to you .

This is where i got stuck , i've downloaded it to my home folder and when selected to do anything with it you are presented with the box in which to write the password , ok fine entered that but now i'm stuck as i can't figure out how to get it in to Brasero to make the dvd .
So forgive me asking but i cannot find , after searching around for hours what i have to do once i've entered the password , i've tried dragging and dropping it in to the Brasero box but it just goes back to the folder .
Thanks in advance , Derek.

Where did you get Zorin? Needing a password to boot is unusual and you may be better off going to the Zorin site where you downloaded it. Have you tried opening Brasero from the Mint menu and navigating to your /home folder where the iso is?

Sorry perhaps i forgot to say it's the premium version of ultimate which is on the zorin-os.com website ,

http://zorin-os.com/premium.html

Basically you download the os and are invited to make a donation [ 9.99 EUR ]in order to get the password , there's a link to paypal to pay and later they send you the password .
The download is in my home folder , normally i would just drag and drop in to the Brasero box but it won't move , when i drag it over it just pops back , to do anything such as open or extract you have to enter the password in to the box after that i'm lost , do i have to extract it or just open it or something else i'm at a loss to know what i have to do to get it burned .
For clarity the zorin 7 core is free to download which i did but you don't get all the features even with the ultimate , the premium it would appear is not .

As a newbie i wouldn't really know if this is normal practice but it seems reasonable , let me know what you think ,

Derek.

So what does Zorin product support say?

I haven't asked for support from zorin , in fact i didn't even realise there was such a thing but now i've looked again at their site i can see that you need to register for support and to be honest i'd feel a bit foolish asking how to burn the thing when i suspect most people would think this pretty basic stuff but i'm a complete novice , that's why i'm asking here ,

Derek.

What exactly do you have in your home directory? I came across a site which indicates you get a link to download the iso file containing Zorin and supposedly, documentation with it. What is the name of the directory/file you have? Usually it will have an iso extension, zorin.iso for example. If you have that, right click on it and select open with brasero. If you don't have that, what do you have.

No reason to feel foolish, they can't see you and you don't need to use your real name?

The whole point of the premium version is that you can get help:
http://www.zorin-os.com/supportstore.html

Well i know that now but i didn't at the time of asking , anyhow i have found the solution by trial and error , it may be second nature to everyone here but it's all new to me as i've never had to burn a locked , password protected zip file before .
For the benefit of those who don't know you download the file in the normal way , i saved it in my home folder , when you click on it the box appears to enter the password in , then once entered you can the extract the file which takes a while as it's 3.5 gb , then you are asked if you want to see it [ you bet ] so i clicked yes and the normal unlocked file with the little disc beside it appears , i knew then i could drag it and drop it in to the Brasero box to continue the burning process .
The burning took about 30 minuites as i was using a dvd for video recording , i expect it would have been quicker using proper data discs but that was all i had .
The burning finished and i loaded it in to my computer and i have to say it's fantastic , it's definitely the one for me as it has just about everything you could wish for [ as a casual user ] , most immpresive is the way you can just switch to the different styles of operating systems , the mac os being a particular favourite of my daughter but there's five more to play with .
My only problem now is my old HP media center , she's about 8 years old and when i put the system monitor up the cpu was working at around the 75% to 90% mark so i don't think it would be a good idea to install it on this computer , just got to figure out how to persuade the missus that we need to buy a new one ,

Derek.

Ah! I didn't realise that the iso had been zipped and so I couldn't see how it was password protected; I expect that was the case for the others here.

This computer is older than yours, and my system monitor is ranging from 15 to 25%. I think something was probably running that you didn't notice. I haven't checked Zorin, but a lot of Linuxes do things like checking for updates when they boot, especially for the first time. See if the usage goes down after 10 minutes, and look in the process tab to see what's using CPU. The monitor itself can use quite a bit when something changes, and you may have some unwanted services running. It may also use less when installed than when running live.

I agree with you about Zorin. I've got it in my guest partition at the moment to test it for a review. I found it got a little confused at the first session after installation (losing eth0, not running the firewall) but at the second boot it had settled down and was fine. I think I shall give it 8/10.

Well i certainly hope you are right about something else running in the background as i would rather not buy another computer just to run this os , i do have some issues with this machine though as i metioned earlier , it would seem my boot section is coruppted , i tried everything finally resorting to a full reinstall using the discs i made back when i first bought it , after the install which was successful you must restart and that's the end of that as no boot just continous rebooting .

So my knowledge exhausted i resorted to the only thing left for me to do namely installing a wonderful os that just works , that's why i'm a true convert .

Regarding your comment about things running in the background surely the freshly reinstalled xp wouldn't be running would it ? , i did wonder if the problem was the old Nvidia 7600GS graphics or the equally old AMD Athlon 64 2.2ghz processor , there are minimum requirements for running this os and i'm not sure if my system is up to it , as i said it runs but with ridiculously high cpu figures even before i attempt to do anything , so i'm not quite sure where i'll go from here but for now i've just installed mint 15 to be going on with , all ideas welcome ,

Derek.

My computer has a 32-bit processor and no graphics chip (other than Northbridge), but it runs any Linux GUI except Ubuntu's Unity.

A fresh installation or live disk of a Linux that's set to automatically check for updates will be busy, because it has no record of the repository data to update: it has to download the complete database.

Well looking at the monitor processes there doesn't seem to be anything other than the operating system stuff , regarding your reply , are you saying that when the os is properly installed and all updates are up to date that the cpu usage would be much lower ?
After removing zorin i thought i would try mint 15 with cinnamon d/e for comparison , once loaded a black box appeared in the corner informing me to only use it for trouble shooting as it was running in special mode as there was no acceleration and that as a consequence the cpu would be working a lot harder than normal , it goes on to say there could be something wrong with my cpu or an out of date driver .
So it would seem that i do have a problem , as you know i reset the oe system back to factory settings , ie sometime in the mid ninties , whether that has anything to do with my problem i just don't know ?

Derek.

Cinnamon needs hardware graphics acceleration. Mate, the other Mint desktop doesn't.

Zorin allows you to choose whether the desktop runs special effects. At log-in time, you can click on the little icon on the right of the log-in box and choose a session with no graphical effects. That will become the default. I'd forgotten about that, and it explains why things are slow. If you're running it live, you log out and log in as 'live' with no password.

Not quite sure i understand you but so far i've only run it from the dvd which doesn't require logging in but i'll investigate that some more , the HP media centre i'm trying it out on is supposed to be '' vista ready'' so surely it would have graphics acceleration ? but i'm not finished with it yet though , yesterday i tried it on another equally old desktop [ 8 years old small form compaq with win xp professional on ] and the cpu on that one was running significantly lower , enough to make me think it's just a problem with the HP media centre ?

My biggest problem i think is i've accumulated three computers over the last decade and all of them are a bit long in the tooth , still , makes a refreshing change on old equipment , i was on the verge of binning the lot of them ,

Derek.

What I mean about logging in is that you can switch off special effects at log in, so to do it in the live session you need to log out and log in again.

The fact that your computer has graphics acceleration doesn't mean that every live DVD will use it. The live session may have a smaller range of drivers available than the installed system: e.g. the Ubuntu live disk won't even boot with Intel video unless it's the latest chip.