[Klug-general] Bash Scripts / Curl Meetup with Stephen

[Mike Evans]

Stephen,

I'm no use to you - I'm the other side of the county.  However, many of 
the distributions these days will run direct from a version of the 
installation CD/DVD, so you can just put one in your machine and reboot 
and away you go at close to zero risk.  Some distributions call this a 
'Live CD/DVD version. It won't touch your hard disk, but said disk will 
probably be accessible so that you can access files there to play with 
for example.  Fedora, Ubuntu and most famously Knoppix all offer this 
facility.  You can download and burn bootable .iso images of live disks 
suitable for your hardware from their websites.  If you buy a copy of a 
magazine such as Linux Format (available in larger WH Smiths branches) 
you will almost certainly find at least one live distribution on the 
included DVD.

Once you have a distro running opening a terminal, which you will find 
somewhere on the menus, will give you the good old Unix-like shell 
prompt you are familiar with.  Alternatively, if you eschew all things 
graphical most distros will dump you right at the TTY login prompt if 
you press something like crtl-alt-f1 through ctrl-alt-f5.

That's not to say that you shouldn't also meet up and socialise with the 
group, or those living close to you.  In fact I'd recommend it :)

Mike