Q I have an obsolete PC with a Pentium 2 running at 400MHz and 128MB of RAM. It has a floppy drive, a CD-ROM drive and a hard disk with only 4GB of storage space. There's Antix, which seems to be a perfect fit to give me a starting place for learning Linux, but I don't have a DVD drive. My friend who does have one is a Windows man who doesn't understand 'an ISO image for burning to a CD'. Do you know some kind soul who would make the CD for me and post it? The addition of Gambas would be wonderful as a replacement for QBasic. So would those newbie guides you say are there. Of course, I'll be happy to pay for the CD and any other costs involved in creating it.
A An ISO image is just the contents of a CD or DVD as a single file. It's an exact copy of the data on the CD or DVD, ready to write straight to the disc. All CD/DVD burning programs can burn an ISO to a CD for you, although the exact options you'll need to select can vary. The first step is to copy the antiX-M7.5.iso file from the DVD to My Documents or any other convenient location. Then replace the DVD with a blank CD-R and start up your CD burning software.
If you use Nero - a limited version is often supplied with PCs - you simply select Burn Image from the File menu. An Open dialog pops up to let you select your ISO image, although you may need to set the file type to All Files to see it. Select the Antix ISO image, press Open, in the options window that opens next, leave everything as it is and press OK, then press Burn - that's it. Burning ISO images is easier than creating a CD/DVD from scratch, because all the settings are taken care of in the image file. If you don't have Nero or a similar program that you can use, there's a free CD burning program for Windows called Express Burn, available from www.nch.com.au/burn. Install this in the usual way, run it and select 'Write ISO image to a disk' from the Burner menu. Select the Antix file and press OK when the Burn Target window opens.
We're unable to supply individually created CDs, but you can copy any of the files from the DVD to a CD using any of the standard CD writing programs and then read them on your PC. Alternatively, for the price of a box of blank CDs, you could buy a basic DVD-ROM drive for your old computer. Linux treats CDs and DVDs in the same way - as far as the OS is concerned, a DVD just holds more. Even video DVDs are the same format as data discs, so there would be no compatibility issues to face in replacing your CD-ROM with a DVD-ROM drive for use with Linux.