🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi,

First of all, don't cross post so intensively. First try a few and gather
the response.

Well, "for free" means you have to download a whole bunch of megabytes.
RedHat 6 is a good 600 Mb's. I have some experience with RedHat and Mandrake.

www.redhat.com/mirrors.html will tell you from where to download. I would
recommend to download everthing first to a secure place in your local
environment (I did it to a workstation in my own network). Next start the
installation from that local machine.
The crucial files are usually in a directory called "RedHat", with three
subdirectories: "RPMS", "base" and "instimage". RPMS contiains all the
installation packages, while base and instimage are the programs used
for guiding the installation. Be sure that after download all the files
in base and instimage have the execution bit set, otherwise your installation
will fail.

Follow the instructions how to make image files. You can use dos rawrite.exe
(from a directory called 'dosutils') to make your own boot disks for linux
(images for bootdisks are in a directory called 'images').

Mandrake has a similar setup, but instead of calling the root directory
RedHat, they call it Mandrake. You need also the Mandrake boot disks for
its installation. For Mandrake you also can download the ISO file for
burning your own CDrom.

However, if you are using a modem to download the whole stuff, you'll be
better of buying a recent CD (Cheap bytes offer then for less than 5 dollars).

I recommend you to get one way or the other the installation files near you
(download or CD), since a newcommer to Linux always needs to install several
times before you've found out how the optimal installtion procedure should
go.

Hopefully this puts you a bit on the right track,

Rob.