User Hostile Download Page

Michael Schwendt mschwendt at gmail.com
Fri Feb 15 15:30:01 UTC 2008


On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 06:52:17 -0700, Charles Curley wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 11:19:50PM +1030, Tim wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-02-15 at 12:22 +0000, Pedro Freire wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Before burning, and potentially wasting a disc, *I* check the downloaded
> > ISO against the checksum.  After that check, I move onto the next step
> > (burning the disc, or simply using that file on the hard drive).
> 
> Good advice. It would help if the sha1sums were readily available. To
> download the DVD image for F8, I went to http://fedoraproject.org/,
> and clicked on "Get Fedora" in the left hand column. That took me to
> http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora. Now, I may be getting blind in my
> old age, but I see no reference to [check|sha1|md5|etc...]sums on that
> page.
> 
> To get the sha1sums (and the rescue CD image) I grabbed the URL of the
> DVD ISO, edited out the file name of the ISO file, and opened that URL
> (http://limestone.uoregon.edu/ftp/fedora/linux/releases/8/Fedora/i386/iso/)
> in another tab. I was then able to pull in the rest of the kit.
> 
> How about providing direct links to these files on the download page?

Too confusing for new users. It would need to cover other operating systems,
offer links to Windows md5sum utilities and so on. And it doesn't protect
from media errors.

Fedora has a built-in media verification step, which everybody, who does
not know how to verify downloaded ISO images and burnt DVDs, ought to use:

  http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f8/en_US/sn-verifying-media.html

Don't skip it if you haven't verified burnt discs with a tool like k3b.

Bittorrent download performs checksum verification automatically, but
does not verify burnt media, of course.




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