The current de facto standard distribution is the Slackware release, available freely over the net. Slackware is easy to install and fairly complete. It's also generally up-to-date with current versions of Linux software. The Linux Installation HOWTO documents installation of Slackware.
If you have a CD-ROM drive, you have many more distributions to choose from. We haven't personally reviewed most of them, and you're more likely to get help from people on the Net for network-available distributions such as Slackware. On the other hand, some CD-ROM distributions come with documentation and support of their own.
Some distributions, such as Slackware Pro, Red Hat Linux, and Yggdrasil take advantage of the storage space available on CD-ROM to minimize the amount of hard disk space Linux takes, by creating symlinks from the hard disk back to the CD-ROM.
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