Hi everyone. Sorry if I'm not posting in the correct area but i looked for another forum that had something to do with my question and this is the closest i found. I'm completely new to Linux and I have done a hefty amount of reading and research lately. I have learned that a good starting distribution would be Suse, Fedora Core, or Gentoo. I have downloaded Gentoo and Suse as ISO files. I tried burning them to CDs as they were, i tried extracting the ISOs into regular folders and directories, and i tried some kind of ISO image burner and nothing seems to make them boot from my laptop CD ROM drive. I know it boots from the CD ROM because the Windows XP disk boots straight off the CD and i have no 3 1/2 inch floppy drive so a floppy boot disk is out of the question. Is there anything else i need to consider? or do?
I have an HP zv500 series laptop
3.06Ghz P4 HT
60Gb HDD
512 Mb DDR SDRAM
128 Mb video
and a bootable DVD+RW/CD-RW disk drive if that helps.
Sorry again if my post is not in the correct forum.