This check is useful especially if you’re burning the cds or DVDs which are not rewritable. If there is any checksum error then you can always download again from the torrent or other means which you prefer to download.
Let’s take example of Ubuntu 12.04 iso. We’re going to check the checksum value of the image in this tutorial.
Open the terminal and get into the directory where you have downloaded the iso file. If you have downloaded the iso in the downloads directory, type the command.
cd Downloads
Let’s check the md5sum of the downloaded iso.
md5sum ubuntu-12.04-desktop-i386.iso
If it returns the following then it is valid iso image.
d791352694374f1c478779f7f4447a3f
If you have downloaded any other ISO images other than i386 for 12.04 then compare it with below values.
9fcc322536575dda5879c279f0b142d7 *ubuntu-12.04-alternate-amd64.iso
bcee4c03b704a9b62988505b7d8f3069 *ubuntu-12.04-alternate-i386.iso
128f0c16f4734c420b0185a492d92e52 *ubuntu-12.04-desktop-amd64.iso
d791352694374f1c478779f7f4447a3f *ubuntu-12.04-desktop-i386.iso
f2e921788d35bbdf0336d05d228136eb *ubuntu-12.04-server-amd64.iso
32184a83c8b5e6031e1264e5c499bc03 *ubuntu-12.04-server-i386.iso
d4aa1eb1131bacd46317dad1afc59ff6 *ubuntu-12.04-wubi-amd64.tar.xz
33452f884d1017aadde0ec468b83264c *ubuntu-12.04-wubi-i386.tar.xz
9813c75c0ef631942b4c9f989588ab85 *wubi.exe
There are md5sum values of other versions of ubuntu distro as well. Just check the value in respective download directory or you can check the wiki page.
