 
If you wish to forgo the book and support you get with the official Red Hat distribution, it is quite easy and legal to make a set of CDs for free. One interesting thing that we have noticed is that various vendors sell these same CDs on Ebay without telling you that these are the same CDs that you can download and create for free. Anyhoo...
The first step is to get the nimages. Although you can get the CDs from redhat.com, your best bet is to go directly to the mirror sites:
http://www.redhat.com/download/mirror.html.
You then want to find iso nimages. You have to search/browse a bit, because these aren't always in the same place. A typical location is: pub/mirrors/redhat/redhat/redhat-7.1-en/iso/.
Grab the nimages you want. At the very least grab disc1 and disc2. If you are using Windows to make the nimages, many programs can read .iso nimages directly with just file/open. For a fabulous reference on how to burn with various programs, as well as a good collection of iso nimages, see CD Burning info.
After you download your nimages, you should use md5sum to verify the integrity of the download against the MD5SUM file in the same directory:
md5sum -c MD5SUM
Once you are happy that you have good nimages, use cdrecord -scanbus to determine what the ID of your burner is:
#cdrecord -scanbus
Cdrecord 1.9 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2000 Jörg Schilling
Linux sg driver version: 3.1.17
Using libscg version 'schily-0.1'
scsibus0:
0,0,0 0) 'COMPAQ ' 'DDRS-39130W ' 'S97A' Disk
0,1,0 1) *
0,2,0 2) *
0,3,0 3) 'YAMAHA ' 'CRW4416S ' '1.0e' Removable CD-ROM
0,4,0 4) 'SEAGATE ' 'SX4464524 ' 'B409' Disk
0,5,0 5) *
0,6,0 6) *
0,7,0 7) *[
To make a CD from your image, just use the info above and the following command:
cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=0,3,0 -data seawolf-i386-disc2.iso
Here we are using quad speed write of the second disk of Red Hat 7.1.
One other tidbit. To mount the image, you need to have loopback support in your kernel, and then issue the mount command:
mount -t iso9660 -o loop ./seawolf-i386-disc1.iso /seamount1
You can even mount nimages from an image that is mounted, say, if you want to see what is on boot.img, for instance.
The loopback device is broken on kernel 2.4.2. Works fine with kernel 2.4.4, though.
Happy burning!
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