checksum

Checksum is a system to tell if your file is correct. I think it adds up all the bytes in the file or something. In any event, the idea is that if the "checksum" the owner of the file ran (and posted for you) isn't the same as the "checksum you get when you run a checksum on the downloaded file, then some errors must have occured in the file.

You will find a "checksum" file with the ISO. So, you download that file to. It's a small file, so it takes about a nanosecond or so compared to the many hours you will spend downloading the ISO.

Now you need a way to actually verify the checksum. Well, this page will tell you how to run a checksum in linux, where to get a "dos shell" to run a checksum and also where to get a windows program.

http://www.linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/verifyiso.html

I used the windows program. Warning: My Icepack linux ISO checked out with no problems. On the other hand, the MD5 checksums I ran on a Mandrake linux download >did not work<! It turned out there were two spaces between the file name and the checksum in the "checksum file" instead of one space. I edited the checksum file with notepad to take out the extra spaces and checksum worked okay.

An other option is to run the checksum program, get a numeric result and visually compare it with the values listed in the checksum file. (It's just a readable text file with a list of files and their checksums.)

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