I'm ready to do it!

[superfly]

Go to: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

Underneath the big green "Start Download" button, there's a small check box that says, "Check here if you need the alternate desktop CD. This CD does not include the Live CD, instead it uses a text-based installer."

Tick this check box to download the alternate installer CD.

[tedanderson]

Thanks! Now I remember why I didn't use that check box- The download never initialized and the page would time out on me. But I will keep trying.

[cjlowe]

Hey, for older machines, you might also consider Xubuntu - it's a stripped down version of Ubuntu designed for older systems without the power to load the full thing. You still get Ubuntu, but you sacrifice a little bit of prettyness and user-friendlyness for a speed boost.

Fedora = Red Hat after a name change, i.e. there's two version of Red Hat now - Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the paid version, and Fedora Core, the free one. Same with SuSE - SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop = $, OpenSuSE = free. Red Hat [and Fedora] and Suse are both widely respected in the Linux world.

[TMcKellar]

Xubuntu isn't necessarily stripped down. It just uses a different desktop system that isn't as memory intensive as Gnome on Ubuntu. XFCE is what Xubuntu uses for it's gui. XFCE is so light you can even run it off of a flash drive.

A word of caution for anyone who might try and download any of the Ubuntu flavors today. The newest release is out today so it might take a good while to download while their servers are getting bum rushed from all the folks like myself who are updating our installs. If you can, use the torrents.

[superfly]

If you want to see all the available releases (the physical ISO files), you can go to http://releases.ubuntu.com/ where they list all the different flavours of Ubuntu (Kubuntu/Xubuntu, etc), and both their Desktop and Alternate machine.