I am currently in the process of downloading Zorin OS 6 (32 bit) and would like to know what is the correct procedure to verify the MD5 sum before burning the ISO files to a DVD (or loading to a USB drive). The MD5 Sum is given in the download page, but there is no reference as to how to compare it to the downloaded file(s) or where to find this information. Any help on this subject will be greatly appreciated. My experience with operating systems has only been with Windows XP Pro but I'm very interested in switching to Linux for reasons best discussed in my profile... Thank you in advance for your help!

Once you've downloaded the iso image, use the 'md5sum' tool to verify if the hash is the same as the one on the website. For example:

the hexadecimal value is the MD5 hash of the iso image.

hope that helps

Centos* provide an md5sum.exe here: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/dostools/
You can download that and run it from the command prompt under Windows.

*I just googled it and it was the first site I trust which has the .exe, there may be others and I chose the site because I have more trust in Linux distro official sites than Windows shareware ones.

Please explain! How do I use the 'md5sum' tool? Where do I find it? How do I compare what I downloaded with the hash on the website? Please keep in mind that I have no knowledge on how to use Linux! Note: I'm downloading Zorin OS6 (32 bit) using a machine running Windows XP.

download the 'md5sum.exe' binary from the url @273 posted above and put it inside your '_windows_/System32' directory. once it's there, fire up command prompt and execute 'md5sum c:\path\to\iso\image.iso'. it will show you the MD5 hash of the iso image.

EDIT: of course change to path to the path where your iso image is located.