absolute novice, need help

[dawa]

can anyone help me? i am in austria and i bought an hp notebook pavilion zv5250EA. the preinstalled os is windows xp home and the language is ofcourse german. that is the problem. i really need to get an english language os and that too for free. since i am absolutely a novice in computer, zero knowledge, i need help in downloading on dvd a linux os and installing it. please can any one help me?

[Dapper Dan]

Hi dawa,

Though I haven't tried it on a laptop, I understand Kanotix, (based on Knoppix), is really good on laptops. It is also a German distro. I've got their live cd and it's pretty smokin'!

Have you ever burned an ISO image before? Do you have access to burning software such as Nero?

If so, download the Kanotix .ISO from their site and burn its image to cd. If you are unsure how to do that, post back.

Once you have the .ISO burned properly to cd, go into your BIOS and make sure your CDROM is first in the boot order. Then, put the Kanotix CD in and hang on!

Being a "live CD" (a complete Linux operating system which runs entirely from the CDROM) you can check it out and see how you like it. If it suits you, you can then do an HD install which wouldn't be too difficult.

[Stormblazer]

Well for downloading it, just pick a distro and follow the intructions on the distro's website, which usually is as simple as clicking the link to download.
For example, Fedora Core provides both CD image ISOs and DVD Image ISOs, as do most other distros.
Gentoo on the other hand, depends on whether you want to do a stage-1 install (compile the _entire_ system locally), a stage-2 install (compile most of the system locally), or a stage-3 (don't compile the system at all). Even then though, you start with a CD ISO image.
Once you've downloaded the ISO image, just burn it onto a CD (or DVD if it's a DVD ISO). Make sure you burn it as an image (most burner software in Windows/Linux has that option) and not as a data disc with the ISO as a file.

Keep in mind these are large files (600 - 700 MB for CDs, 2 - 4 GB for DVDs).