I have never used Linux before and about a month ago I decided to give it a try. I downloaded knoppix and could never seem to get it to work right. I recently got a computer for my room and wanted to try and install redhat on it. I downloaded redhat from linuxiso.org. I also downloaded an md5 checksum program for windows. First question, does the md5 sum have to be the same as the one from the website?, because when I did the check sum they were the same except I don't know what it is comparing it to because I only downloaded the iso. Does the md5sum come on the iso? When I first tried to install redhat all it did was try to load the vmlinux thing but didn't get past that because it had an error. Then I redownloaded it and tried again. This time it got to a part where it asked if I wanted to test the media and I said yes. Then it said there was no md5sum on the media to check with or something like that. So how do I check the sum correctly, and if it needs to be on the disk how do you get it on the disk because when I click on it on the website it just takes me to a web page with the sum printed out? Does it have to match this sum? Basically I've downloaded almost every linux distro from linuxiso.org and haven't gotten any of them to work. I am burning them as an image so noone brings that up. Sorry for the very long list of questions. I really hope you all can help me.
Thank you.