Greetings all,

I have downloaded the iso's for Slack 10.2 and would like to verify that they are okay. I thought it was just a case of doing...

$ md5sum slackware-10.2-install.iso
<some_long_string>

...then comparing the returned string with one on the Slackware download directory. The only other file i get from the Slack directory is a slackware-10.2-install.iso.md5 file and i'm not really sure what to do with it. So my question is how do i check the Slack iso with the md5 file?

I used to order cds before so i have never had to do this in the past. Thanks for your time and any help you can offer.

Cheers

I'm not too sure what you're asking. The process you described is correct! Just compare the output of md5sum with that given in the ISO's associated .md5 file. You can probably get md5sum to do that for you, check the man page. I usually just compare character by character myself, though.

Nylex is completely correct, but possibly not clear enough to a new user. slackware-10.2-install.iso.md5 is a text file which contains the proper md5sum of the iso you downloaded. Open it up using any editor, or just 'cat' (without the quotes) slackware-10.2-install.iso.md5. You will see the proper string of numbers that md5sum should re-create.

Okay, i managed to view the string in the md5 file, i just viewed it in a text editor and it matched the output from the Slack iso file.

Thanks for the help, it's appreciated

The best way to verify your ISOs is to do this:
# wget ftp://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slac...all-d1.iso.md5
# wget ftp://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slac...all-d2.iso.md5

make sure that the md5 files are in the same dir as the ISOs then:
# md5sum -c slackware-10.2-install-d1.iso.md5 <-- This will check against the md5 file
# md5sum -c slackware-10.2-install-d2.iso.md5

OR
a more automated way would be to copy the text in both files into one file
Make a file with these 2 lines:
-------------------------------------------------------
774e8ea9fe094e8f793c2452187d2723 slackware-10.2-install-d1.iso
d289b63caac14eb150f32e05e385b3ea slackware-10.2-install-d2.iso
-------------------------------------------------------
name this file anything then:
# md5sum -c md5.file.name