For normal use we recommend installing TeX Live over the Internet or from DVD, but if you want to burn your own DVD, you may want to get our huge ISO image. It is around 1.2GB compressed (md5, sha256 checksums). You can:
The image is compressed with xz. The compression is much better than with zip or bzip2 or gzip, and for the file this size, it's worth it.
If needed, you can get the sources
for xz utilities and/or the xz binaries,
including Windows, that we've compiled for TeX Live. From a command
prompt, run
xzdec <texlive2009.iso.xz >texlive2009.iso
to decompress it. If you prefer a Windows GUI interface, try 7-zip.
If you want to mount the image to make the contents available for
installation or browsing, a typical invocation on Unix is:
mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop,noauto /your/texlive2008.iso /mnt
On Windows, you'll need third-party tools such as daemon-tools or Magic ISO.
After mounting the image, if you then want to install TeX Live, follow the installation instructions or read the documentation.
The ISO image is not updated after release; it is meant to serve as a stable marker in TeX development and to correspond to the DVD sent to TeX user group members.
The uncompressed ISO is not available from tug.org or CTAN; it is too wasteful of bandwidth.
The compressed ISO image, as well as the top-level readme files and the decompression programs for supported platforms, are also available as texlive2009.torrent.
Start it with your favorite torrent client—except it has been reported that the the torrent does not work with the transmission torrent client; bittorrent, uTorrent, and Enhanced CTorrent have been reported to work.
Please, after having downloaded the full torrent, keep the torrent client running for some time to seed the files so that the files get better distributed.
Information about other ways to acquire TeX Live is available separately.