Obtaining Linux/BSD
From TWUUG
This article is a work in progress. If you know a little (or a lot) about this
topic, please help us out and add to it using the "Edit" link to the right.
Contents |
Buy CD's/DVD's
Many vendors on the Internet sell low cost CD's and DVD's of popular linux distributions.
Or, you can come out to one of our TWUUG Meetings - at the end of every meeting, for a small donation, you can get CD's or DVD's of the latest and most popular linux distributions. Other FOSS-related CD's may also be available, such as "The Open CD". See also our Discs page.
Make your Own CD's/DVD's
Making your own Linux/BSD CD's/DVD's is one of the first skills you will want to learn if you get into Linux. To do this, you need a high speed connection (or access to one) and a CD or DVD writer drive for your computer.
Where to get ISO's
The first place to look would be the home page of the distribution you want to obtain. See Choosing a Distribution. Look at their "download" page to see some local mirrors you can choose from. You will want to download CD images, called ISO's. An ISO file is about 700 MB for a CD image and much, much larger for a DVD image. Some linux distributions like Ubuntu only come with one CD image, while others come with three or four CD's.
Downloading ISO's
If you get your CD image via HTTP or FTP, try to choose a mirror close to you. Here are some local linux/open source mirrors to Hampton Roads.
- Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA
- Virginia Tech Computer Science Dept., Blacksburg, VA
- Argonne Nat'l Laboratory (Illinois) Not local, but very reliable and fast, and a wide variety of distro's
- Secsup.org - Fairfax, VA
- Ibiblio - UNC Chapel Hill, NC VERY wide variety of distro's
- Kernel.org - California Distro's in "dist" folder ... hosts Knoppix DVD ISO's (very few places host that) - very reliable + fast
Bittorrent is also a good option and will provide very fast download speeds as peers help share the load.
Checking the ISO's
Checking the validity of your downloaded ISO's is especially important. For more on this topic, visit our page on Checksumming
Burning the ISO's
Burning ISO images to a CD is supported by most popular CD recording software packages available today.
The most important thing to remember is:
DO NOT burn the ISO file itself to the CD! Choose the option to BURN IMAGE or similar option in the software.
Burning ISO's can be accomplished through the cdrecord utility on UNIX/Linux as well as through the following program available for Windows Computers:
When using the above utility, be sure to download the correct version for whatever version/service pack of Windows you are running.
InfraRecorder is a free, complete CD/DVD burning solution for Windows. To burn an ISO, goto InfraExpress and under the "copy" menu click "Burn image to disk"
