If you have a fast connection, you can go to this site (www.linuxiso.org) and download - for free - a file containing a CD disk image of any of 35 standard Linux distributions. That's an exact copy of a complete, ready to install, Linux distribution just as it ships on a CD. The site describes these copies this way:

"Think of it as the equivalent of a screen capture, but instead of capturing the information on a screen, this image captures all of the information on a particular Linux distribution's cdrom. When burned as a disk image, the .iso file is turned into a duplicate cd of the original."

If you're not familiar with the shorthand jargon, ISO refers to the 'International Organnization for Standardization,' and in this context is short for 'ISO 9660,' an international format standard for CD-ROM adopted by the ISO. An ISO 9660 (or 'ISO' for short) CD should be readable on any standard CD drive. So you download these files, and then burn them as a disk image (not just as a plain data file) to a CD, and presto - you have a duplicate of the setup CD for whichever flavor you chose to download. This has got to be about the easiest way to experiment with many flavors of Linux. Very handy!

Bob Warner

Webmaster's note: Most of these distro's are actually from mirror sites which can vary greatly in download times, depending on traffic, etc. A 640 MB image (most distro's are at least one and sometimes 3 if you get auxilliary stuff and source code) has taken me from 45 minutes to 25 hours (!) with a broadband cable connection. To protect against burning a bad download the site has a checksum utility, which won't save download time, but at least will avoid burning a bad image.