Linux Help for Beginners: Second Step--Making and Using a Live CD
Okay so now you have (hopefully) decided on a distro you would like to try out. Great! But now what?My favorite way to try out a new distro is to make a "Live CD." This is a boot disk that allows you to try out a distro without making any changes to your computer...kind of like the "try before you buy" concept. How the Live CD works is you download the distro you want onto your computer. Then you make a CD image of the file. Then, you reboot using the cd rom drive and it runs the operating system from there! You can play around with the distro, checking out the things you like (or don't) before you decide to install it. If you don't like it, you just eject the disk, restart the computer and nothing has been changed. Now, let's go through the process of making a Live CD step by step.
What you will need to make a Live CD:
- A blank CD-R disk---700 MB -OR- A blank DVD-R disk
- A CD burning program capable of burning an image file.
- A CD burner or DVD burner
- one felt tip permanent marker
Making a Live CD
- Go to the website of the distro you want. I will use my favorite distro, Linux Mint for this example. So first I went to the Linux Mint website and picked the version I wanted (main). There is usually a link called download or download mirrors or torrent. I prefer mirrors myself so I click that link and choose the area closest to me. Depending on the distro, a download will either start right then or you may have to choose your file..most likely you will be clicking on the highest number.
- The file you want to download is an .iso file. This means the file to download will have a name followed by ".iso" This means it is an image file.
- Whenever you click on a file to download you are asked if you want to open it or save it, etc..choose save and then save it to the desktop. This is the easiest way to ensure you do NOT misplace that very important file!!
- Now that you have the image file downloaded to the desktop (finally!), it is time to put it on a disk. Get a blank CD-R (DVD or USB stick if you are using one of those methods). Preferably use a blank, one time use CD-R disk rather than a re-writeable one. For some reason, the iso files burn better on a CD-R. Put your blank CD in the drive and open your CD burning program. Make sure you choose the image burning option.
- Choose a relatively slow speed to burn with; this works best for iso files. Be patient, it will take a little while to burn. When it is done, if you have the option, do an integrity check. This makes sure that there were no corrupted or missing files on the image file. When it's done, poof! you have yourself a Live CD!! Write on the disk what distro, version, and date of burning so you can reference it later.
Now the waiting game begins......and a couple of hours later, you should have an .iso file sitting on the desktop with the title of the distro you chose.
