a while ago in a computer magazine in the cover dvd their was a version of i think redhat on dvd which did'nt need installing you could run it off the dvd, and when you had finished you took out the dvd and rebooted to get back to normal.

does anyone if this is still so? as i have only one machine and no room to install anything else. x)

I'm not sure about what Red Hat offers but essentially they were talking about a live cd. This is a complete Linux OS that runs entirely from the cd and will have no effect on your hard drive OS. There are many live CD distros out there, most of which are Debian based.

Failing finding the Red Hat live cd you are referring to, I can recommend others I've tried.

Here are my current preferences in order:

1. BeatrIX
2. Mepis
3. Morphix
4. Slax
5. PCLinuxOS
6. Kanotix
7. Damn Small
8. Knoppix
9. Ubuntu
10 Gnoppix

For more information about any of these, do a search at Distrowatch.com.

Live DVD?? I wasn't aware that there was such a thing.. Much less a RedHat version. The only Live CD version of RedHat/Fedora is Basilisk.