On Sat, 2004-05-22 at 15:06, Joe Button wrote:
Hi.
While thinking about making some free CDs to give out to people, it occurred to me that I'm suggesting people but CDRs of dubious provenance into their PCs and boot from them, which is probably not a good thing to be suggesting.
I was wondering if there was any way people could verify their CD's md5sum against the 'official' one from the distro site. The two hurdles that immediately present themselves are:
- I don't know how to get an md5sum from a CD once it's been burnt, or
whether it would generate the same md5sum as the iso anyway
Under a sane os, You can generate an md5 of the CD as a whole with md5sum /dev/<cdrom> and this should be the same as your iso.
and
- The target users won't have a Gnu/Linux system with the relevant utilities
on.
md5summer.org is probably the most userfriendly for those who are not used to md5. I can't remember if you can do a md5sum of "e:" under windows (where e:\ is the cdrom and md5sum of e:\ == md5sum of iso).
If it does produce the correct md5's then it's easy... that will match the one the distributor posts on their website. The md5sum of the ISO is of the raw filesystem on the cd rather than all the individual files.