Using the MD5 check sum

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 06 March 2005 21:08, Richard E Miles wrote:
>On Sun, 6 Mar 2005 18:03:26 -0800 (PST)
>
>Brad D <jakaiju at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I would like a quick explanation on how to use the md5sum program
>> to check the ISO downloads with.
>>
>> The intructions on the redhat site state, "After downloading the
>> ISO images, check the MD5 checksums for the ISO images to ensure
>> that your download was successful. Do this by running the md5sum
>> program from a shell prompt against your ISO images and comparing
>> the values returned against the ones published by Red Hat."
>>
>> How do I use the "shell prompt" to do this?
>>
>> Tahnk you
>>
>>
>> ---------------------------------
>> Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
>>  Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
>
>See man md5sum.
>
Unforch Richard, I believe he's asking for much more basic help than 
that.  Yes, he needs to do a 'man md5sum' from a shell and read up on 
how to execute it, but first he needs a shell.

If in kde, there should be a picture of a monitor screen on the 
toolbar, probably located at the bottom of the screen.  Clicking the 
mouse on it should open a window with a blinking curser near the 
upper left corner of this new window.

If in gnome, a right click anyplace on the otherwise blank area of the 
screen should bring up a menu, and one of those choices should have 
the word terminal in it.  Left click on that line of the menu, and 
again, a window should open with a blinking cursor near the upper 
left corner.

In either case, you have now opened a shell window, and in most cases 
you will have, within the rights of your login, the run of the system 
in the text mode.  And will also have the combined power of bash at 
your fingertips, 'bash' standing for Born Again SHell, an extremely 
powerfull script language interpretor.

>From that blinking prompt, be sure you've clicked once in this window 
to transfer the 'focus' of the keyboard to it, you can then type 'man 
md5sum' and read the fine manual page that tells you how to use the 
md5sum command.  When done reading the manual, a simple 'q' without 
the quotes quits the manual reader, and you can then type the command 
that will do the md5sum check/verify you asked about in the first 
place.

But I suspect you will have to learn a few other commands too, 
commands such as 'cd' to change to a different directory, and ls, or 
ls -l, to see the contents of that directory.  Why?  So you can find 
where it is that the file you just downloaded was stored.

Good luck, and welcome to linux.

>--
>Richard E Miles
>Federal Way WA. USA
>registered linux user 46097

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.