Linux.com

I hope I posted this in the right forum, sorry if it should be in new to unix.

When you downloaded Ubuntu, you should have ended up with a file named "ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso". A .iso file is an "image" file. An "image" file is a conglomeration of a lot of things. It includes the file format, the directory structure, the files in those directories, etc., all in a single file. When you burn an image, it's different than burning a file. The image has to be deconstructed back to its original form so that when it shows up on the destination disk, it has the original file format, directory structure, and files that the original source had. The burner software will do that for you, but you have to tell it you're burning an image rather than a file, even though you're starting from a file. How you do that depends on the burner software you're using, so you'll have to consult the help files for that, look it up somewhere, or tell us what you're using and maybe someone will look it up for you. Once you've burned the image to a CD or DVD, most modern Linux distros will be self-booting. You'll have to go into your computer's BIOS and tell it that you want to boot from CD rather than HDD before that'll work. At that point, a reboot will boot from the disk you've created, and you can either run the distro from there, or install it. If you're new to Linux, you might want to just run it from CD for a bit to get a feel for it. It won't mess with your HDD unless you decide to install it.