Complete idiot newbie wants to install suse

[Mors]

Hi,
I'm unfortunatly a windows user and have been all my life (sad) but i want to see the light and install suse (as I hear its quite good) and learn the superior OS!
Unfortuantly I know absolutley nothing about linux, apart from I managed to install Mandrake 7.1 off the cover disk of a magazine ages ago as it was quite straight forward, BUT, this is my problem:
I thought I'd go to the suse website and download it, but where the latest version is on the ftp is about 60billion gig's worth of files - surely thats not a installable cd??!!
So I had a nose around the suse website, but there instructions for making a bootable cd are mental, I can't understand what I've gotta do!
So, can someone help the village idiot get this going, so much as a link or tutorial of some kind somewhere would do (as long as its not too complicated!).
I know I could go out n buy it (the easy way) but I thought I'd try this first :D

Thanks for any help

Mors

[z911]

actually if you've never really had any serious experience with linux I advise you to go out and buy the Suse8.0 Personal copy. It's an awesome distro and very user friendly. It's geared towards first time users and even administrative tasks are almost fully automated through Yast the sysadmin tool.

the personal version will only set you back $39.95 in the US. as you gain more and more experience then you can start looking into upgrading from the websites for free. the main advantage with buying your own copy is that the distro has all the software you could possibly need on the installation dvd or cdroms. this way you don't have to go fishing on the net everytime you need something. the help files are also pretty good as well as the hardcopy documentation that comes with it. It's one of the best ways I know to get started in linux.

let's learn to crawl before we can learn to fly... :D

[anacron]

My advice is to go out and invest $40 for either Mandrake, Redhat or SuSE. They all very easy to install & use, and for your $40 you gets tons of easy to install software, a user's manual and 30 days worth of support.

And if you want more software than you could ever possibly explore, spend the extra $30 and get the Power Pack edition of the Linux distro. That way you'll avoid most of the "How do I get 'such and such' installed mess...

[KageMurai]

SuSE, unlike RedHat, only provides the packages on their server. I would also suggest buying a distribution as bootable CDs are very helpful if you can't boot your system anymore.

I have been using SuSE for about one year now. I started with 7.1 and have upgraded to 8.0 recently. It's the ideal choice for Newbies who want to try Linux after Windows.

[Infrastructure]

Here's a link (http://www.distrowatch.com/review-suse.php)
to a distro-watch article that explains how to do a FTP install of SuSe 8.0. Hope this helps!