The best way to download Mandrake is with BitTorrent; which allows you to download from multiple peers at the same time, and share the bits that you have with others as well.
To do this on Linux (or any other OS) you first need to locate the torrent file. The Mandrake 10.0 Official torrent can be found here. Just save it to your your local machine, or copy the URL, which you can later paste into your BitTorrent client.
I used the command line version of BitTorrent, however there are graphical clients as well. Navigate to where you want the downloaded images to be stored, then from the command line type:
btdownloadcurses.py Mandrakelinux-10.0-Official-Download.torrent
The client will start up and show you how much and at what rate you are downloading and uploading. It is very exciting to watch your bits fly out and know you are helping someone else download the same thing you want. To participate fully you do need to open a few ports up in your firewall (or router). See here for how to get that working (very easy). After the download has completed you can keep the program running and you will continue to upload bits to others.
Once you have the images downloaded to your hard drive you will want to burn them to CD. If you are on Windows, then Mandrake has some simple documentation on how to burn the images to disc, see here. I will show how I did it from the command line on Linux. Again there are graphical clients available, but this was the fastest way to do it for me.
First you will need to find out where the tool thinks your CD burner is, so at the command line type:
cdrecord -scanbus
For me the result was something like this:
scsibus0:
0,0,0 0) ‘PLEXTOR ‘ ‘CD-R PX-W4012A’ ’1.02′ Removable CD-ROM
I am the cautious type, so before burning the image I did a dry run:
cdrecord -v -dev=0,0,0 -dummy -speed=40 driveropts=burnfree Mandrakelinux10.0-Official-Download-CD1.i586.iso
Note the -dummy flag. Also this assumes you are in the directory where the images are currently located.
When you are ready for the real thing pop a blank CD-R into your CD burner. Navigate to where the CD images are on your hard drive, and then from the command line type:
cdrecord -v -dev=0,0,0 -speed=40 driveropts=burnfree Mandrakelinux10.0-Official-Download-CD3.i586.iso
There you go. Do that for each of the three images and then you will be ready to install Mandrake Linux 10.0 .
Bittorrent’s also the best way to download movies and stuff.
…I, uh. I’ve heard.
Gotta love Windows. They purposefully left out the capability to burn ISO’s. Anyway, I prefer isorecorder. It’s a small, well, plug-in, I guess. Download an ISO, insert a blank disc to your burner, and right click on the ISO. isorecorder adds a menu option to the right-click interface.