[sdtPikachu]

Yep, it's free. There are two (easy) ways of going about it though:

You can either download the install images from the web and burn them to CD (seeing as my discs occupy three full CD-ROMs, I'd onlt recommend this if you've got a high speed connection). Apart from the time it takes and the connection costs, this is the "free" method.

Or you can buy copies of these images that somenoe has burnt onto CD so people don't have to go to the hassle of downloading them. This is how I did it, and I spent £9 (about $12 I think) having 3 CD's burnt and posted to me.

If you want more money to spend, then you can splash out on one of the official boxed distributions from Mandrake, SuSE, Redhat or the like. These cost about £30-50 and come with full documentation and about 8 CD's worth of stuff, such as the full source code and whatnot.

If you have a high speed connection, apparently you can even install directly off the internet... but this sounds a bit complicated to me!

And if there's any budding programmers out there, mine and I imagine al other Linux distros come with a comprehensive set of developing tools, such as compilers and whatnot.

The main thing to remember that Linux is free in the sense that you can do whatever the hell you want with it... you can write or modify existing programs and redistibute them by yourself if you want. The cost of the CD's is all you'll ever pay for (except that some of the distro's come with applications that aren't free, such as Sun's Star Office), and virtually anything can be downloaded from the internet for nowt.