Obtaining Linux/BSD
From TWUUG
Contents |
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, or one with a very good connection. Here are some Open Source Software mirrors recommended by TWUUG members, and why. Be aware that some mirrors offer only CD images, and other, more capable mirrors offer DVD images of any given distro.
- HTTP TDS.net This was mentioned by a TWUUG member at the January 2010 meeting as the only website he knows about that can take full advantage of his FIOS Internet connection.
- HTTP Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA
- HTTP Virginia Tech Computer Science Dept., Blacksburg, VA
- FTP Argonne Nat'l Laboratory (Illinois) HTTP Not local, but very reliable and fast, and a wide variety of distro's
- FTP Secsup.org - Fairfax, VA
- HTTP Ibiblio - UNC Chapel Hill, NC VERY wide variety of distro's, ibiblio.org also hosts a variety of things other than linuces
- FTP Kernel.org - California HTTP Distro's in "dist" folder - 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"