I just wiped xp from an older computer with pentium 4 processer and want to down load Linux. Which do os do I use for just starting out ?

Which Linux operating system you use will be entirely a personal choice and will depend upon what purpose(s) you have for it. To begin, I would suggest you go to the site below and look at the Page Hit Ranking section on the right side of the page for the more popular distributions. There are links there to each which will give you more info.

http://distrowatch.com/

You could also google "linux chooser" which will give you several sites that ask you some questions and will make a recommendation based upon your answers.

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I aggree with what yancek said about personal tastes, but I think that Ubuntu is an easy OS for those just starting into the Linux world.

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Depending on the hardware specs (CPU, RAM, video card) of your old pentium 4, you may have better results using a "lightweight" distribution such as: Xubuntu, Lubuntu, AntiX, CrunchBang, etc.

I think the question is how to download Linux when the computer can't boot because it have, somehow, been wiped out. Depending on the level of effort, there is many solution. The easiest one is to download Xubuntu or an other light distro on a other computer. The geekier one would be to use a bootable floppy to kickstart the download on the targer computer (netinstall) so you can download the OS without an installed OS. Of course, in both case, it require some level of access to an other computer. You can't create something out of nothing unless you are a genius. This is true for most things in life.

My advice would be to find a second computer and burn a live-cd. The floppy part is cool and old-school-ish, but very very distro still provide kickstart floppy for empty computers.

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If that is ithe case then we'd need to know what resources are available.
- Have you downloaded and burned to disk a linux install already? if so which one(s)?
- Has windows been wiped out or can you go back to it?
- Does the computer have a CD or DVD drive?
- Were the USB ports working last time you checked?
- Do you have access to another computer?
- What operating system install disks do you have?
- If those disks include windows do you have matching licence keys for them?

But yes I would use another computer to download the desktop version from http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop
This is what is called a LiveCD, though it may require a DVD now... not sure...
Boot up from that disk and choose the Try option just to see if it will work straight up and present you with a desktop.
If it did, double click on the install icon on the desktop.

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Thanks for the suggestions. Ido have another computer and i will try a live disk and see if that works.

If it's an older computer, then the Ubuntu disk may not work (if it has Inter graphics, for example). See my answer to this poster:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...os-4175440975/