I don't know how to install Linux
 

Hello new friends,

I just downloaded the following iso

mandriva-linux-one-2009.1-KDE4-europe1-americas-cdrom-i586.iso

burned it, put it in my cd-rom, hit power on my laptop and now what?

It's not doing anything... asked me if I want to boot from CD or
hard drive and I selected CD. And nothing happened.

Please help.

Thank you

are you sure that it is capable of your laptop's architecture ?

Did you use a CD burning application which recognises the "iso" format? This format contains all of the data as well as the boot sector of the CD. This is what your machine will use to boot from the CD.

You need to burn the image to disk as Image and NOT as data disk. So you need to choose option something similar that will say "Burn Image to Disk". It will make your disk bootable.

Also, did you check the MD5 sum of the ISO image against the known sum (which you should be able to obtain from the same place that you downloaded the image)?