After reading til I am now totally confused, I am going to start with Knoppix.
Am I starting too high?
The terminology used just boggles my mind, but going to try.
Is there a site any where that gives instructions on installation in plain English?
I believe the download will run itself from a CD just as soon as I burn the files
onto the CD.
If I am starting with the wrong package, feel free to tell me so.
Thanks

A Live CD is a very good place to start as you don't have to touch your hard drive to use it. All you should have to do is burn the image and then with the CD still in your CD drive reboot your computer and sit back and wait for it to load.

Installing linux via downloading cd images has a few simple steps:
1) Download .iso file(s).
2) Checksum them to check you've not got a corrupted download. Usually md5sums (sequences of 32 characters) are posted with the links to the .iso files for you to compare to the md5 generated from your copy of the .iso
3) Burn the .iso as a cd image, not a single file.
4) Set your pc to boot off cdrom first, put the cd in and reboot.


IIRC Knoppix is a liveCD distro which means it doesnt need to be installed onto your harddrive, meaning you dont risk you current pc setup, but have no saved settings and are limited to RAM.

With a linux distribution you typically get more than simply a desktop, you'll get Office applications, server programs, simple games, programming language compilers&interpreters, multimedia tools and much more. Available for free and with the source code for you to see how it's all made.

There are other newbie friendly distros, such as Mandrake, Fedora (aka RedHat) and Suse which use a precompiled .rpm package management system to install software, kinda like Microsoft InstallShield downloads (just download, run, done). These distros also come with many nice graphical configuration tools to ease your maintainance of your new linux system.
Other distros which are considered harder to use include Gentoo and Slackware which have binary and source based installation systems, meaning you are more likely to mess with compiling, as well as hand editing config files via the command line (lots of white text on a simple black screen).

Although this is try right at the start of using a Linux distro I started with SuSE and found it quite hard to use as it seemed to be lacking a lot of packages so after using that for a couple of months I switched to Slackware 10.0 which is one of, if not the best distro to actually learn how Linux and your computer works IMHO.

Thank you for the quick replys.
I need to ask if corrupted downloads are common.
I downloaded Knoppix from the German home site.
The only frustration I had is the text file.
Took about two hours to sort and separate.
I did see the checksums file, but did not know what is was for until
your post. I did see a comment, also about checksums, when reading
through different Linux accredited sites.
Thanks again to both of you.

Now problem sotch I just hope you enjoy using Linux. As for corrupted downloads I don't think there particularly common but it's good practice to check. Especially on such a big thing with loads of binaries which I believe are more susceptible.

This is never stressed enough times:

Do check MD5 *before* toasting the stuff: if you can't get a CD to boot because of weird errors, if you are unable to install or even boot a distro which everybody else runs w/o errors, it's not Linus Torvalds fault, nor is Linux a technically impaired OS; it's quite and simply that your ISO is corrupted!!!

Proud IMHO this little 3 point list of yours should be set as sticky by the admins, or at least go into the Wiki (!)