The basic install

I got my ISO's from http://www.linuxiso.org/
I chose Mandrake just 'cause I've heard it's the easiest distro.
This could be good or bad, it's nice when things are easy, but often I find that I miss out on essential knowledge by tasking the easy distro. If something doesn't work, it can be harder to fix in these "user friendly" packages because they use custom files, locations etc..

I burned the CD's on a Windows PC. You may be able to do this on a Linux PC but I light years away from having that system. The install went very well,  a few mouse clicks. It recognized some obscure hardware, I was impressed. For software, I selected what I thought would get me Apache, PHP and MySQL. We'll see.

I skipped the Mandrake club offer. I already joined a couple of years ago. I don't mind giving some cash to the open source community once in a while. I'm not much of a developer, money is about all I can really give back. If you're and end user, why not pick a group & send them a few bucks once in a while?

The install said it would check for updates, but it didn't work. I tried it manually with Mandrake Update and still didn't work. Finally picked a different mirror (Utah) and got my updates, there were a lot of them too. So who knows what the problem is, guess it doesn't matter, just one of those things that's not 100%.

So from here, time to start working on the system...