I have a netbook which means no cd drive. Any other ideas? It would be nice is somebody could send me a jump drive
Creating a bootable USB stick with one or more OS's on it has been around for a while but sometimes the hardware can be persnickety about booting from USB. You can certainly go down that road if you have the time and energy to do that and see how far you get.
This may sound extreme but it works for me - buy another machine to try Linux on. In this day of brand new $200 laptops that come with Linux already installed, or buying a used desktop or laptop for very little money I think you're way ahead. In years past I used to spend hours upon hours doing partitioning, formatting half a dozen filesystems and carefully crafting a boot manager to create a house of cards system that could boot multiple OS's for all the things I wanted to do. Today, I still run multiple OS's but most are on different machines now and they share data on a simple home network. If I need to do a windoze thing, fine, I fire up the windoze box. For linux things I can use any one of multiple machines, some with multiple versions of Linux on them. There's a W2K box in the shack, DOS on my radio bench, a dual boot Doze7/Ubuntu laptop and a couple more desktops that serve as test platforms. I could care less about what the OS is, that's just the means to the end - the application I need. No OS does everything today so I use whatever OS on whatever hardware I need to get what I want done.
Anyway, my point is especially if you're not familiar yet with some of the underpinnings of Linux and especially dual or multiboot techniques, get yourself another machine (can be a $50 hamfest special or an orphan/cast-off) to experiment on. I see way too many posts in the Linux forums I frequent where people try to do dual/multi boot on their primary machine, bollocks it up and then it's a train wreck of lost data and OS reinstallation. Contrary to how many in the Linux community will tell you that it's "easy" I would disagree. Maybe easy for them but for someone who is only familiar with the windoze paradigm, Linux is a foreboding, unintuitive and unfamiliar world you cannot google yourself through. Install it on a dedicated machine where experiments have little risk and mistakes are more readily recovered from. Once you get it figured out you can start to transition it to your primary machines and gain the benefits of computing freedom.
Mark K5LXP
Albuquerque, NM
