hey all-

thanks for taking the time to be patient with someone who's new to the linux world. i just finished DL'ing powerpack and thought everything would be on one .iso file, but i'm a litle lost because in addition to the 4.5gb iso that was included there are 5 other files, mostly 1kb with MD5, SHA1, IDX and (2) ASC files, and i'm not quite sure what to do from here...just burn the big .iso file to DVD and it should work...anyway as you can see i'm in need of a little help. thanks in advance!

Hi auke1,

You're actually partly right... the .iso file you downloaded is everything. It contains the OS plus all the packages that you'll need or want.

The other files that you mentioned are merely there to help you verify the authenticity of the 4.5Gb .iso file you downloaded. Briefly, a so-called hash was created for the .iso file using the md5 algorithm. If you open the 1kb MD5 file, you'll see it's just plain text that contains the name of the .iso file and a cryptic key. You can then use various tools which use that cryptic to verify the .iso file has not been corrupted when downloaded, or altered by anyone. Without going in to too much detail, if the contents of the .iso file were in any way modified (either intentionally/maliciously or not) then the cryptic key would not match, so you'd know in advance that the file was not to be trusted.

Hope that makes sense... I'm not sure I've explained it as best as possible, but post back if you're unsure about anything

That should work. The other files are what they call "checksums". They are just a long string of numbers and letters (I think hexadecimal). Programs exist that will take the .iso file you downloaded and compute a checksum. Then you compare the number from the program with the number in the file on the server to make sure you got a complete download.

If you're in Windows, try WinMd5sum. If you're on linux, I think you can just type md5sum downloadedfile.iso replacing with the right .iso name. Then check the 1kb file on the server for MD5.

Each of those are files that have certain coded info, i.e. the md5sum, which can allow you to determine if you have an accurate download. The md5sum is just a long series of numbers and letters that are uniquely associated with that file and that typically look like this:

e8d38c702a9cc4a97ccbce23e472e46e

This md5sum info is provided in several different formats for users on different systems.

There are md5sum programs that will examine your iso and generate an md5sum. If that md5sum agrees with the printed one, you have an accurate download.