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Hey,
What is the smallest version of Linux I could download? Is there a version which is around 100 - 200 MB's in size and is easy to use.
Thanks,
James

Have you got nero or any other CD burning program?

If you have, you just burn ISO on using "burn image" (or some similar option).

Then you should be able to boot from it

Ok,
The ISO file - I was not able to burn to disk but I managed to extract the ISO file using WinRar - Can I just shove all of the extracted files on CD and boot from it? Or does it have to be in ISO format?
Thanks,
James

Should have this sorted by tommorow.

He writes excellent books (fiction) too: I particularly recommend The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon.

Hahaha, thats a good read U.K.!

Oh dear, that looks scarily long. Rest assured: I didn't write any of it, ergo it is worth persevering with.

gamesfreak wrote:
> Linux is (again like Miserableman said - nice analogy) like a kit
> car

It is a good analogy. Here it is taken to the extreme by Neal Stephenson [URL]http://home.earthlink.net/~android606/commandline/[/URL] . Long, but well worth reading:

The analogy between cars and operating systems is not half bad, and so let me run with it for a moment, as a way of giving an executive summary of our situation today.

Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.

There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.

Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.

Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.

On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.

One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.

BeOS is a beautiful operating system, but whether we're UNIX, Linux, BeOs, or Apple users - we're still all basically PWN3D by Microsoft. Five years since this essay hasn't changed that.

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.

Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.

The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it's a fringe player.

The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:

Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"

Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"

Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"

Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."

Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"

Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"

Bullhorn: "But..."

Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"

Yes, I understand the concept of this.

Like you have said, to a casual user, a memory dump is pretty much Greek to them.

Meh, it's all opinionated I guess. All I know now is, I wouldn't ever go back to Windows.

It won't. A memory dump is basically what the program has stored into memory at one time, just before it crashed. As the programmer, you'll be able to see what's up. For the user, it's most probable they won't be able to fix it anyway; if it becomes *that* serious it's best left to those who wrote the program.

Less serious errors however, are up to the programmer(s);, and their level of error support. Someone can write a fully working program and not include any exception routines, so when it crashes it does so like a woman scorned. However, most programs nowadays take into account most of the possible errors; you may notice that the type of error messages vary through programs; that's because they are made by the app, so aren't standardized.

I don't see how a memory dump will help...

I don't want this to turn into some Windows vs Linux debate

So does Windows. See the memory dumps they give you? That's what you need to debug.