How to verify the checksum of a downloaded file in Solus OS Linux

Written by Administrator on Tuesday April 7, 2020

Why do you need checksum?

Checksum serves to verify, that there was no corruption while downloading a file and that original file is the same as you have on your hard disk after downloading.

First of all you have to get correct checksum of the downloaded file from owner of the file or website, where you got that file. Normally you will see something like this:

SHA-256 checksum: c66aa2a0d49d5eced6f95dcb2f029907791e7b26c3381747318cce0007fbc198
md5: c3b3d4bc455ee51147e41c8f6b2d5c2a

Then you have to compute md5 or sha256 checksum for the file you downloaded and compare the signature with the signature you see on website/original source of the file.

Let's look, how can we do it on real data.

I have several files in my Download folder:

edustorage@edustorage ~/Downloads $ ls
 dissenter-browser_1.5.114_amd64.deb
 end-of-flameshot-installation.png
 netsurf
 netsurf-all-3.8.tar.gz
 palemoon-28.9.0.2.linux-x86_64.tar.xz
'Screenshot at 2020-04-05 17-58-31.png'
 shtool-2.0.8
 shtool-2.0.8.tar.gz
 start-flameshot-installation.png

And I want to check, if palemonn-28.9.0.2.linux-x86_64.tar.xz wa downloaded without problems and its signature is the same as it is written on the web, where I did get it:

Ok, let's generate signature for the file we downloaded:

$ sha256sum palemoon-28.9.0.2.linux-x86_64.tar.xz 

and see the result:

c66aa2a0d49d5eced6f95dcb2f029907791e7b26c3381747318cce0007fbc198  palemoon-28.9.0.2.linux-x86_64.tar.xz

Yep, signatures are the same!

Category: linux Tags: md5 solus sha256 checksum