Partly because I want to be a good citizen and partly because I suspect my distros of being corrupted (due to either bad downloads or bad CD burns), I decided to buy a copy of my distro (MEPIS) instead of downloading and burning. But because I'm a few months away from being laid off, I wanted to save money. So I went to linuxcd.org and bought a CD for a few dollars, thinking it was a good compromise, a halfway point between a free download and buying a package from mepis.org. Do you agree?

The prices I have seen (on Distrowatch) start at $1.95---How much of that do you think goes to the author/maintainer?

If you download, check the MD5 sum, and burn at reasonable rates, there should be no issue with getting free distros. Then donate directly to the author.

Well, for you it was, I suppose, if it was worthwhile to pay money for a CD instead of burning your own. For mepis.org it did them no good at all, unless they get money from linuxcd.org, which I'd bet is unlikely.

no, not at all. that's only for people who can't download an iso. nothing goes back to the project, only profit to the bloke that burned the cd. There's no "good citizen" angle there at all.

Okay, so I was wrong. That answers my question. Oh, well, I could still send MEPIS money.

I have no idea, but I thought some of it did, because honestly, I supposed that distributors pay the creator for permission to sell copies. If not, why in hell don't they have to?--they should.

There might be, because my MEPIS (both 7 and 8) has been awfully buggy and crash-prone for some time (even after reinstallations), and I haven't seen any othert MEPIS users complaining of that. I suspect bad downloads, bad burns or bad CDs, and I wanted to eliminate those possibilities.

They are being perfectly good citizens, and doing nothing wrong in the slightest.

[cough] I see you answered my last post while I was busy editing it, Chris; and I'm supposing you might be annoyed to see that I significantly changed the wording of it. Because I'm a perfectionist writer who almost always edits and re-edits his posts on every website he posts on, you might want to wait a few minutes before responding. My apologies.

if you check the md5sums you'll know 100% that the file you have is just fine. if it's not, it won't crash occasionally, it just won't install in the first place. That's if it's corrupted. If it's modified by someone else, well that could have other experiences, but that's the point of checking an md5sum.

That leaves the possibility of bad CD burns or bad CDs, even though I learned long ago to not burn faster than 4x.

I've not had a problem in 5 years at least. Reckon you're going wrong somewhere. ;-)

I expect so. So my CDs are unreliable. So it's safer to buy a pre-burned copy. Quad erat demonstrandum.