I used the Distro Chooser and was suggested Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and Mandriva as perfect matches along with Fedora, MEPIS, and PCLinuxOS which all failed the criteriun "I have never used Linux before."

I would like to use Live CDs to see which distro I want to use. I will be dual booting with Windows XP. I am using an IBM Thinkpad A30, 2.0 GHz Intel Pentium something or other, 512MB RAM. I found a wiki on ThinkWiki.org for installing Kubuntu on my specific laptop model.

I made a Live CD of Kubuntu and tried to boot from it. I heard the CD drive whirring but it failed and ended up booting XP. I did not follow the thinkwiki.org instructions, I followed the instructions from Kubuntu's website. I did not do the Checksum thing because I didn't understand that. If I need to edit my BIOS, I don't know how to do so.

Will my USB devices such as iPod, external hard drive, Bluetooth mouse, etc. still work with Linux?

This should be an easy issue. Your laptop is appaerantly set to boot from HD first. You need to enter BIOS when you first start the laptop. It usually states which key to press in order to get there. Commonly used keys are F1, F2, F10. When you get to the setup, seek something similar to boot order or startup. There use the menu to make CD-ROM the first boot device and HD second. Then it will boot from CD and if there's no CD in drive, it will boot from HD.

Yes they will although I've had bad experience with bluetooth devices. Mine keyboard had 'sticky-keys'. When I pressed once, it took it as I would have pressed it like three to seven times

My digicamera and USB-memorystick and USB-HD work flawlessly in my Gentoo Linux.


All in all, welcome to world of linux

Will my USB devices such as iPod, external hard drive, Bluetooth mouse, etc. still work with Linux?

Yes, most of it will probably work, either out-of-the-box or with some configuring. But don't expect Gnu/Linux to be like Windows.
For example, you will not be able to use iTunes natively (maybe with Crossover the windows version will work, I don't know), but there are open source projects that aim to support managing your music on the iPod in a similar fashion, such as GTKPod and Banshee.

Your external harddrive could be a problem, if it is using the NTFS filesystem. With this filesystem, you are effectively limited to read-only support in Gnu/Linux. If you want full read/write access across Windows and Linux, and even Mac, I recommend using FAT instead. But if you need to store big files larger than 4GB, I recommend using ext2 (2TB filesize limit) or ext3. There exists a project (Ext2 IFS) for Windows that will enable full read/write access.

I hope that helps, and good luck with it!

[edit]
PS, if you must use NTFS, there are projects that try to provide full read/write support, such as captive ntfs for example. But YMMV.
[/edit]

I created a live CD of Kubuntu and set my BIOS to boot from CD first, then HDD. I put the CD in and turned it on and it booted Windows from the HDD. What did I do wrong? Is it just your average coaster or did I make a mistake? Can you put a distro on a USB flash drive and boot from it instead?

Make sure that when you burn the CD, you burn it as an iso bootable image, and not simply as a data CD

Your results with the distro chooser puzzles me. I would definitely say that PCLinuxOS is the most newbie-friendly,free disto out there at the moment.It handles NTFS without a problem. All handles all the proprietay multimedia formats out of the box. Mepis comes close (also handles NTFS), but doens't have as many formats pre-enabled.

I'm using CDBurnerXP Pro 3 and I'm very confused about what settings to use. I check "Make Disc Bootable" but there's all sorts of other properties that become available when it's checked. They are Emulation Type, Load Segment, Sectors, Platform, [unchecked] Disable ISO File Delimiters ( ; ), and [checked] Enforce ISO Level 1 (8+3 char max). At the top there is also a place to choose a directory and it points to "CDBurnerXP Pro 3\Tools\DosBootImage.IMA

Edit: The ( ; ) created a smiley so I added spaces.

all you have to do is download the iso of a live-cd-distro and burn it. no need to change the burner settings to make the cd bootable, as this is already included on the iso. i've never used xp's burner though, always sticked to nero.

as a linux newbie myself i prefer mandriva over ubuntu , but currently i'm dealing with arch.

I don't have Nero, I can't afford it. Is it possible to boot from a USB thumb drive? That would be a lot easier than wasting a bunch of CDs because I don't know how to burn them.

Ooh, I see you are a fellow Chilean =]

Assuming the CD burning software you have is set up to understand it, you should be able to burn an .iso image the correct way simply by double-clicking on it.

However, not all Windows CD burning software understands double-clicking on the .iso file, and even if your program does understand it Windows might not have the file associations set properly.

Still, it can't hurt to try. Just close all programs and double-click on the .iso file and see what it does. If everything works, then it should automatically open up your CD burning software along with some dialog window for you to burn the CD image.

I selected "Create a Data CD or Burn an ISO Image."

Double clicking the .iso files opens them up in WinRAR.

Hmm...that option is certainly the correct one, but it's a strange option to offer because "Create a Data CD" is fundamentally different from "Burn an ISO image". It's too easy to mistakenly create a Data CD which has a single (unbootable) file on it names blahblah.iso, rather than doing what is actually desired--creating a CD from the .iso image.

See, if you're burning an .iso image, then none of the following options make any sense: Make Disc Bootable, Emulation Type, Load Segment, Sectors, Platform, Disable ISO File Delimiters, Enforce ISO Level 1

So it's pretty confusing. It's unfortunate that WinRAR has "taken over" the file association for .iso files. There may be an option within your CD burning software to reassociate file types to itself. But figuring that out may be non-trivial.

I guess it's best to try and figure out how to use this CD burning software.

hi dudes

I've encountered about the same prob when i tried to boot my FC5 to install dual boot with winxp.

I've downloaded the DVDiso file to my hd and using winrar to unrar.Then i used nero to burn the files to dvd as iso(the first selection when nero prompts u for the type of format u wana burn to).However when i tried to boot from the fc5 dvd after configuring my bios to boot from dvd drive first,it did not boot and went straight to winxp instead.So as read from the posts i may have burn it into a normal data iso instead,thats y it cant boot??In that case is there any other options tat i can choose in nero to burn it into bootable iso??

That's right.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to use WinRAR or any other program to extract files from the .iso unless you want to get access to individual files from an image without burning them to a CD. If you extract files and then burn them to a data CD, the result won't be bootable.

i still cant get it to boot.
here goes wad i did:
1)burn the .iso file(the winrar archive,did not unzip it this time)
using nero6 and burn as "DVD-ROM(boot)".I cant burn it to other formats as the file is larger than 2GB,which nero prompt indicated.
2)my boot sequence is 1st:"cdrom",2nd:"hard disk" and 3rd:"hard disk".
3)when i try booting it up..there is a prompt stating "boot from cd:..",then some text seems to appear for a very short time(cant figure it out)and then boot into winxp again..

anyone knows why it still cant boot up?or is there anything else ive missed or done wrong?

problem solved.

at the nero "new compilation" prompt i chose to "open" and navigate to the .iso file.it then open with dvd(image) properties and start to burn.

geeezzz..how can i missed that...