Lately I have been burning some CDs with various Linux distributions on them, and thought it might be a good time to put together a short set of notes, because every time I do this I usually have to re-learn at least a few things.
As a general point, most Linux distributions will make available "iso" images for download. You can think of these as downloadable CDs. So you have to download these files and then copy (burn) them onto a blank CD. I have been doing this on Linux, and some of what follows is specific to that platform (especially use of cdrecord). ----------------------------------------------------------------------- First, you must locate your Linux iso. Each Linux distribution will have their own iso files, so in effect this means choosing your Linux distribution. If you don't already have a favorite, you can go to a repository like http://linuxiso.org This contains links to many of the most popular linux distributions, and also has direct links to sites that contain the necessary iso files. Or, you can go to the individual distribution sites. I have been using Mandrake and White Box Linux quite a bit the last 6 months, and you can find them here... http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en-us/ http://whiteboxlinux.net/news.php On both of these pages you can find download links that will take you to various mirror sites that contain the iso files. Downloading the iso files is actually the most tedious part of the process, and even if you get a slow mirror site it can take a very long time. One advantage to going to the distribution site is that you can choose among various mirrors, whereas if you go to a site like linuxiso.org then they pick one for you, and if it is slow it's hard to do much about that. Also, sometimes these network connections seem to break rather easily, which leaves you with an incomplete download Now, there are newer and better methods of downloading things that use techniques like bittorrent, but I haven't tried those out yet. Anyway, I just use my browser (mozilla) to save the iso files. I am sure that this isn't the recommended way to do things, but so far it has worked fine. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Now, once you have downloade the iso files, you must check to make sure that you downloaded the whole thing. Due to the size and slowness of the downloads, as well as the brittleness of some of the connections, it's possible that you might not get a complete iso file, and that will make your installation fail. So, the convention is to check your md5sum value. Each distribution will give a md5sum value for each iso file, and you need to check the files you downloaded and make sure they correspond to what is expected. An md5 sum is a 32 bit value that is unique to the file, and based on it's size and content (I'm not sure of the precise details of this either I'm afraid). Fortunately, it's easy to check. If your downloaded files are called linux-cd1.iso linux-cd2.iso linux-cd3.iso Then you can run md5sum linux-cd1.iso etc. to see the md5 sum value. Note that many linux distributions seem to have 3 installation CDs these days. The first CD is usually for standard stuff, the second for more advanced things (that we commonly use) and then the 3rd CD is for internationalization support, like for fonts and documentation. I find that all 3 CDs are typically useful, so I just start by burning them all. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- OK, so you have downloaded your iso files, finally. (It often takes quite a while to get them all done). Now you must burn those files onto CDs. One iso file per CD. There are lots of ways to burn cds. There are numerous programs for Windows (roxio, nero, etc.) and Linux (toast, cdrecord, ...). Since I am doing this on Linux, I use cdrecord. For whatever reason, I have to be in supervisor mode to run cdrecord on my system. I'm not sure if this is standard or not. First, I need to find the special "code" that identifies my cd rw drive. There is a better technical explanation of this, but for the life of me I can't remember what this is... Anyway, you can find out the "code" for your various i/o devices by running the following. cdrecord -scanbus This will output a list of your I/O devices, and provide a 3 digit code that serves as a unique identifier. My CD-RW is identified as 0,0,0, but that might vary from system to system. Then, I run cdrecord as follows cdrecord -dev=0,0,0 linux-cd1.iso This will write your iso file (filename.iso) to the device known as 0,0,0, which in this case is my CD-RW drive. There are many other options with cdrecord, but I've never really had any cause to use them so I don't know what they are. :) Here's a nice explanation of how to burn CDs on Linux... http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOWTO.html Now, once you created all your CDs, you are ready to install linux. That's another topic of course, but in the last year or so most distributions have become very easy to deal with. One tip, once you have downloaded your iso files, if you can afford the disk space, keep them around. The time to burn the CDs is generally much less than the time to download (even on a very fast connection such as we have here at UMD). Also, I would not even consider trying to download an iso over a phone line connection. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/x3XolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! 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