Chi Chi wrote:
I have tried downloading Linux off the net but every time the download fails
how can I go about getting linux for free?

Well, if you are downloading Linux on a very slow line, or using a very
slow computer, or your connection is not stable then the problem is the
hardware itself. If all of that is working fine, then you might want
to have your RAM checked as downloads of large data tend to really
exercise RAM and even one sporadically failing bit out of 128,000,000
would cause the download to fail.

So, as a possible alternative, find someone with a high speed connection
and good computer that has some experience with it and have them
download the "DVD" version of Linux. You can download the 4 CDROMs
instead but I have found that it is so much easier to have everything on
one disk - providing your machine as a DVD reader, which it really should.

I prefer the Redhat Fedora Core4 (or the latest Core5 release) but there
are several different ones mentioned, and quite frankly I think they are
all quite good. Burn this onto a DVD as an ISO image. Read the various
websites mentioned earlier about doing this, plus Redhat's website
contains step by step instructions on doing this.

Put the DVD into your machine, reboot it, choose the default on most
everything it asks and it should fully install the OS within 45 minutes.

The only other issue I would suggest being careful about is "dual boot"
setup. Windows is designed to not allow this configuration (Billy Gates
doesn't like anyone using any product but the overpriced ones he sells
you himself) so you need to sort of trick the system when setting this
up. I prefer to just eliminate Windoze entirely.

Cheers,

Robb