Hi There,

I just downloaded a Fedora Core DVD ISO (FC2-i386-DVD.iso, to be exact) using bittorrent. The download consisted of the 4.2 GB ISO and a 1 KB file called MD5SUM. There is no extension at the end of the MD5SUM file. I know that the MD5SUM file is used to verify the integrity of the download. My questions are....

#1 Should the MD5SUM file have an extension (I read in another forum that sometimes the .md5 extension is removed during the download.)?

#2 What program do I use to verify the download?

Currently I am running Windows XP Professional on a Athlon XP 1800, 256 MB DDR ram,

Also, I am a complete newbie to linux (as you can probably already tell) so the more information you can give me, the better. Thank you.

The md5sum program does check the integrity of the install media.I don't think it'll be a problem if it doesn't have an ext.Try installing the distro and see if the media integrity test launches.
If it doesn't then it must have been incorrectly downloaded.See if this affects the install.If not,go ahead with the process.If you are really insistent on utilizing md5sum,download it from the GNU site:http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/ or go to the site ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/coreutils/...2.1.tar.gz.The package contains the core utilities that includes md5sum.You won't get it as a stand-alone.Hope this helps.

Try this link: http://linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/verifyiso.html - it will explain how to check md5s

XavierP and corbis_demon

Thank you both so much for your help! The MD5SUM file with no extension had the md5 number I was looking for. I just had to add a .txt extension to is and open it with notepad. I ran the md5summer program http://www.md5summer.org/ on the downloaded .iso and compared the 32 bit hexadecimal number to the one listed on the MD5SUM.txt file and they matched. Thanks again for everything.