Download Drupal
You can obtain the latest Drupal release from http://drupal.org/project/drupal.
Drupal has been translated to many different languages. Check whether a released package of the language desired is available at http://drupal.org/project/translations.
Drupal files, and associated modules, are compressed in the .tar.gz format and can be extracted using most compression tools.
Downloading and extracting for Linux users
If you would like to download version x.x of Drupal from the typical Unix command line, use the following commands (replacing x.x throughout the rest of these commands with the version you want to install, such as 5.7, 6.13, 7.2, etc.):
wget http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-x.x.tar.gz
tar -zxvpf drupal-x.x.tar.gz
This will create a new directory drupal-x.x/ containing all Drupal files and directories and will preserve all of Drupal's file and directory permissions. Move the contents of that directory into a directory within your web server's document root or your public HTML directory.
mv drupal-x.x/* drupal-x.x/.htaccess /var/www/html
The base URL for your Drupal installation will be set in your Web server's configuration file. You will need to know this URL before proceeding to the next step of the installation. If you are installing Drupal on your local machine the base URL may be: http://localhost. If you are installing Drupal onto a Web server your base URL may be a specific domain name (such as http://example.com).
Note for Mac users
Mac users may also want review this handbook page during installation: http://drupal.org/node/22676
Especially in cases where you don't understand where the "web server's document root or your public HTML directory" is on your local machine as referred to above.
Note for Windows users
A number of compression programs, such as 7-Zip, allow you to extract .tar.gz files. To use 7-Zip, right-click on the .tar.gz file and, in the menu that appears, select 7-Zip -> Extract Here. A .tar file will appear. Right-click on the .tar file and again select 7-Zip -> Extract Here. In a few moments, the final Drupal folder will appear.
Note for SELinux users
Users of Fedora or other distributions with SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux) should not move files unpacked into their home directory into the Web directory /var/www/html.
As posted at http://drupal.org/node/50280 moving a file preserves the context with the directory in which it was created. In this case the files are incorrectly associated with the home directory (user_home_t) instead of the web directory (httpd_sys_content_t).
Instead, copying the files to the directory /var/www/html will cause them to inherit the context of the correct directory:
cp -R drupal-x.x/* drupal-x.x/.htaccess /var/www/html
If you have already moved the files you may re-associate the files using the command chcon to change the security context for the files:
chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t /var/www/html