I feel like people who write those tutorials assume a basic computer literacy from their readers. I am not assaulting you, I am replying to an assault: you have no idea how to burn a bootable CD. Period. You're not even ready to install an OS, any kid of OS. So go get yourself a basic "Build your own PC" kind of book, read it, and then try more advanced tasks such as installing operating systems.
Another problem is that my situation is probably an outlier. My computer is in Spanish, which makes it a lot harder to mess with. Plus, it runs on Windows XP from 2002. On top of that, my disk drives are slightly messed up. They burn correctly according to the MD5 hashes, but one of them might not read well. Finally, none of the two computer-literate people I know are around, and "build your own PC" books are hard to find, universally in Spanish, and expensive (here in Santiago).
I'll keep trying until I find the stupid mistake I've been making all along.
And you're right. I'm being hostile; I've spent too much time over the computer over the last few days, and I'm going a little crazy. But, much like being drunk, driving oneself crazy does not excuse what you do/say when you're kind of crazy. I apologize.
Edit: both CD drives work properly.
Edit: I followed the tutorial, and burned the CD. I'm going to reboot now (both fingers crossed).
"The computer is personal again."
(I'm also trying to install rails on my mac. It's also ridiculous. You download 2 gigs of stuff, follow every instruction to the letter, and then your computer says
daniel-cussens-computer:~/src danielcussen$ mate .~/.bash_login -bash: mate: command not found
and
Error 2740. An unknown token can't go after this identifier.
which basically translates to: Error: PWNAGE! L2P, noob.)
To some up, at least in my experience, the amount of BS a user has to go through to get linux is rather enormous. I hope it's just the messed-up, non-generic user settings on my computers, but the amount of crap I've had to do makes Linux a complete impossibility for anyone who doesn't know what hexadecimal code is. But I accept the bullshit, because I know it's a right of passage, and it's worthwhile to know what a disk image, a disk ISO 9660 format (or is it file system?), a BIOS, booting priority, repartitioning, defragmenting, checking md5 hashes, and a virtual machine is. I'm going to make it happen if it takes me all week. But from a user-friendliness point of view, this is hell. I shouldn't have to know any of those things. I hope my situation is rare, because if it's not, the linux community has some serious problems.