So you’ve decided to give Linux a try using one of the many fine live CDs. You’ve downloaded a CD or DVD image and now you need to burn it to a disk. But how? I could try to be funny here and tell you that the best way to burn a CD is using Linux, but I won’t [ insert appropriate smiley here ]. After all, you’re still running Windows and, for now at least, you just want to test drive Linux. Fair enough. Here’s how you do it.

If your system has a CD or DVD burner, it came with some kind of package that lets you burn the Ubuntu image to a blank CD. If you don’t have a program to burn a CD image, or you simply can’t find one with your system, I’m going to recommend that you check out Alex Feinman’s ISO Recorder program. The program is available from the following address.

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

The program is simplicity itself. After you’ve downloaded and installed the program, ISO images appear in your Windows Explorer file manager (or on your desktop) as a CD icon with the letters ISO across it. Simply right-click the image and select Copy Image to CD from the pop-up menu. A CD Recording Wizard appears to guide you through the remaining steps (see figure below).

ISO Recorder makes it incredibly easy to burn ISO images to CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. (click the above for a larger image)

Despite having a couple of other CD burning programs on my test Windows system, I nevertheless always use Alex’s program to burn ISO images. I do it because it’s easy, it’s fast, and it’s free.

Note: The above is largely an excerpt from chapter 21 of my book, Moving to Free Software.