Newbie Install Question - downloading and burning the install CDs, p2p

[Tommy Trussell]

On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:27:23 -0600, Tab Gilbert <tabbox at gmail.com> wrote:
> Gonna give Kubuntu Live a
> try later to see if the checksum problem still exists.

When you download an iso image, look in the same directory for
md5sum.txt or filename.md5 files, and grab one of those, too. Then
when your download is complete, you can have your machine check to
make sure the file downloaded OK before you even try to burn it.

If the checksum file is "md5sum.txt" download it into the SAME
directory as the .iso file(s) then type this command:

md5sum -c md5sum.txt

If the md5 file has more than one checksum in it but you didn't
download all the files, it will complain about each missing file.
HOWEVER if it does not complain at all about the file(s) you DID
download, that means that file is OK. If you use the option -vc rather
than just -c, it will print the file name and say "OK."

It's complicated to check the md5 checksum of an entire burned CD
against the iso checksum. The Ubuntu CDs have a md5sum.txt file that
lists all the package checksums, so from a working linux box you can
check each of the files pretty easily.

I just popped an i386 Hoary Preview CD in this machine... this is a
Debian ppc machine (slightly different OS, VERY different processor)
but I can check the checksums of every package on the disk at a
terminal prompt:

mount /cdrom/
cd /cdrom/
md5sum -c md5sum.txt

it's cranking through all the packages right now. The first try I used
-vc so it was saying OK for everything. It's easier to just let it say
whether it found a problem.

If this test identifies some bad md5sums, you might be able to install
the rest of the packages on the CD, but since there are all sorts of
reasons the files might not be readable you might want to toss that
disk and check your burning procedures (try burning at a slower speed,
see if you can tell the blanks were physically damaged, look for lint
in the CD reader, etc.).