this is a comment, not a question. I see a lot of newbies posting about having problems with downloading disto's. What i did, was just went to the local book store and bought.. ( a linux magazine, actually a few ) and i feel it was a great investment, I have live dvd;s both ubuntu 7.10 ubuntu 6 pack with all current versions and open suse. from the dvd I had ubuntu 8.4 up and running in about 45 minutes, and if anyting goes wrong, i just re-install. So that's always an option for learning about linux.