If you haven't tried again, yet. Set your burning software to burn an ISO image; and, burn
it at a very slow speed.

Here is a post on the MD5 from the Linux Mint forums:

"There's a good guide to doing the md5sum check at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM. The instructions for Windows (with screenshots) are about 3/4 down the page. The md5sum is generally included when you download the .iso file."

Good luck, and Welcome to Freedom :cool:

about the CD didn't starting at the boot time: do you have a very recent PC / notebook that uses the EFI technology? control if so into your bios options.. in that case, disable it and the CD would start, this time (if well burned, of course).. :)

It is important to consider your hardware, some distros are lighter than others,
you might want a lightweight distro/install if your hardware is somewhat old(more than 5-6 years).
Don't fry your hardware with more load than it can really handle.
Ubuntu is easy to use and good options for Linux beginners.
Debian is a good choice also very customizable and somewhat easy to use.
There are many others of course it don't hurt to try as many as you want, live cds are a good thing, you can try different distros without installing it.

Regards

Ubuntu or Linux Mint are good starter distros in one sense as they hide you from the command line and you can install new programs from a gui. I don't think you'll learn too much about the core system using them this way as everything is easy :P

I still suggest using them but try to use the command line to do things. A great way to learn, especially as I noticed you wanted to set up a LAMP system. Installing a minimal system (no gui) is a great way to get to know the ins and outs of the system. I used this a while ago to help me set up WordPress on one of my VMs.. http://library.linode.com/lamp-guides/centos-6

I like Slackware. It wasn't my first distro but it's the one I stay with. Ubuntu was way to bloated and slow and I hated Unity. Fedora was good but slow. And I didn't feel like installing drivers on Debain. Slackware just worked. It was easy and unbloated. XFCE runs perfectly so does fluxbox. It's also the longest surviving distro.
Also KDE runs perfectly fast. On a 1.73 GH Pentium M laptop with Intel Graphics and a Gig of RAM