Okay, I've been looking around. Examining the various distibutions. I've looked at Debian - which I thought would be right for me, but doesn't seem to be capable of playing with my machine - drat! I've looked at Mandrake - has possibilities, but may be too much like Windoze for my tastes. However, I'm going to give a download a try. I'm at the dl site, and it has two versions, and I don't understand what they are - hopefully someone here can give me a clue. (Hand it to me, don't slap me with it, kay? )

There's a choice of "Mandrake Linux 9.0 for i586 and Higher" and also "Mandrake Linux ISO Images Mirrors for i586 and Higher". Can anyone tell me what the difference is between them and which one I would want to download? I'm wondering if the ISO images are an upgrade to an existing Mandrake distro?

Thanks,

Sadie

I found something that said the ISOs are for burning to a CD, and I remember someone mentioning that earlier in the thread, but I didn't understand it. Does that mean I just download the files and drop them onto a CD? Or do I diskcopy? I'm sure some of you have done that, right? Should I be looking for special instructions?

Disregard my earlier question - sorry about the wasted post.

You got XP rig.
That should have CDRW drive.
It comes usually with Nero or Easy CD Creator.
Use that to burn your .iso

ya an iso is a fancy name for a file system that a data cd uses. a iso file is what you would burn to a cd. ya nero is super good and simple

Thanks! Now I'm just waiting. Hopefully, this download won't take the 14 hours it's currently saying. *grimace* I have cable modem, so it shouldn't.. still, who knows?

I'm probably going to download more than one distribution and try them out. I didn't much care for Redhat when I installed it last time, although admittedly that was an older version and it may have changed. (5.2) Still, I'm gonna disregard it for right now, and check out Mandrake and Slackware. I almost used Slackware last time I installed Linux, and now I'm sorry I didn't, because at least I'd be ahead of the game. Still, it will be an adventure discovering which one I like.

I was really interested in Debian, both from what people on it have said in various threads (I did a search), and also from information on a couple of Debian-related sites that I found. But near as I can tell, it won't run on a P4, and it won't work with an NVidia Vanta graphics card (integrated), much less with my CD Burner. I don't even think my hard drive was listed (it's a NEC). Pretty disappointing.

You guys are all great, and I'll refer anyone who asks here. I'll probably stick around, too. (Even after I finish driving y'all nuts with my questions!) Good communities are hard to find, and I like to give something back. (Hopefully by then I'll be able to!)



"Use the horse Fluke.. err.. use the Fork Duke.. oh drat it! Just press that button there!"

How long should it take to download the ISO files for Mandrake, does anyone know? It says nineteen hours, it's already been downloading for over two. I have a cable modem, which is getting killer speed. Could the mirror be lagged? Should I try another site? Or is this normal?

Thanks!

It took me about 5 hours to download each RedHat iso from linuxiso.org. It's a free service, so you can't complain.

Try another site Sadie, I'm on cable and got it in 20min.

Just because you have a cable modem doesn't mean everything is going to download super fast. You have to remember the other end has to have an adequate bandwith for a 'broadband speed download' amongst the many others downloading from them.

Yes, but with cable and a good mirror you can download almost every distro in a day. My ISP provides a file library with linux iso's and there are a coupl of local mirror sites that give me 500KB/s +.

Okay, I switched to a different site and left the dl up over night, it looks like it took about 5 hours. I then read the readme included with the distro and it said to use md5sum (from etree) to check the files because sometimes there's an error when you dl using a browser (which is what I did). It came back with so many errors I couldn't even read them all!

After hunting around on the etree site, I discovered that the errors are avoided by using an FTP client, so I dl'd a client and I just finised bring down the distribution. It only took me about 2 hours for the whole thing.

Hopefully I won't be finding errors in it now.

Thanks for all the help guys! I really appreciate it.

Just hold on, you'll get there in the end. But you're not out of the woods yet, just keep posting till you're up and running !

Lol! Hopefully I won't drive anyone nutty before then!

On this forum ? Inpossible !

This is where I downloaded my Linux distribution from. Check it out hope it helps.

http://www.linuxiso.org/