Free web space - 248Part IIIChoosing and Installing a Linux DistributionThere is
248Part IIIChoosing and Installing a Linux DistributionThere is also a facility called BitTorrent (http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent) you might want to look into. BitTorrent lets you download a file to your computer bygrabbing bits of that file from multiple computers on the network that are download- ing the file at the same time. For the privilege, you also use your upload capacity toshare the same file with others as you are downloading. During times of heavydemand with a new Linux distribution, BitTorrent can be the best way to go. If you are on a dial-up modem, you should strongly consider purchasing Linux CDs(or getting them from a friend) if the DVD or CD with this book doesn t have what youwant. You might be able to download a whole 700MB CD in a couple hours on a fastDSL or cable modem connection. On a dial-up line, you might be talking a whole dayor more per CD. For a large, multi-CD distribution, available disk space can alsobecome a problem (although, with today s large hard disks, it s not as much of aproblem as it used to be). Burning the Distribution to CDWith the CD images copied to your computer, you can proceed to verify their con- tents and burn them to CD. All you really need is a CD burner on your computer. With Linux running, you can use the md5sumcommand to verify the CD. If you are using Windows to validate the contents of the Linux CD, you can get theMD5Summer utility (www.md5summer.org) to verify each CD image. Assuming you downloaded the MD5 file associated with each CD image and have it inthe same directory as your CD images, run the md5sumcommand to verify the image. For example, to verify the KNOPPIX CD shown previously in the wget example, youcould type the following: $ md5sum KNOPPIX_V3.6-2004-08-16-EN.iso5bc8e9fee2a8be0b7180fcf3e49b5386 KNOPPIX_V3.6-2004-08-16-EN.isoThe MD5SUM file I downloaded previously from the download directory was calledKNOPPIX_V3.4-2004-05-17-EN.iso.md5. It contained this content: 5bc8e9fee2a8be0b7180fcf3e49b5386 * KNOPPIX_V3.6-2004-08-16-EN.isoAs you can see, the checksum (first string of characters shown) that is output fromthe ISO image matches the checksum in the MD5 file. So you know that the imageyou downloaded is the image they put on the server. As long as you got the imagefrom a reliable site, you should be ready to burn the CD. Note14_