Burning .iso of Linux Mint?

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Cluttermagnet
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Burning .iso of Linux Mint?

Post by Cluttermagnet »

Hi-
I'm trying to get a good copy of Linux mint. I only have dialup here. I downloaded Barbara 2.0 using a friend's broadband connection. I got the entire distro OK. But Nero was not working right on this XP machine and had errors finishing the CD.

Can any one recommend a good, free software CDR burner utility to make an .iso of the downloaded file? Nero is useless on that machine.

BTW I can see the .iso on the 'bad' CDR that Nero burned on my own 98SE machine- but it will not boot as a live CD. I know for sure that machine will boot on other Linux live CD distros.
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900i
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Post by 900i »

Where you from Cluttermagnet? If you are UK based, I could post you a Linux Mint CD!
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Post by Cluttermagnet »

Thanks, mate-
If I were in the UK, I'd take you up on your kind offer. I'm in America (the real one, not the one you hear so much about in the news lately). I have Barbara 2.0 but plan to download Bea 2.1 on my friend's broadband connection. I will figure out how to burn a good .iso of that distro and try it as a live CD first.

I have a lot to learn about Linux. Linux Mint sounds great- just what is needed for a newcomer. I am fairly geeky, but only in a Windows environment. I need a CDR burning tool, therefore, to produce my .iso in Windows.

BTW, Win98SE can see my 'bad' .iso of Barbara 2.0 and reports the file size as 711.538.688 bytes. Will this distro truly fit on a '700M' size CDR?
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900i
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Post by 900i »

Ok Cluttermagnet, here's the link to your burner

http://www.deepburner.com/

Next when you burn an ISO, there is no iso file visible on the disk, you can just see the directory structure. Do not drag and drop the Linux Mint 2.1.iso to the burner. You have to burn a disk image
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Post by clem »

and YES, our ISO files DO fit on the CD. And there's a lot of efforts put into that :lol:

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Post by Cluttermagnet »

Thanks, Clem-
Yes, I see on the Linux Mint website that it is 695M.
I'm over at my friend's house now, and am about to download Bea 2.1 via broadband ISP. Also I am going to grab a copy of DeepBurner- thanks 900i !
Last edited by Cluttermagnet on Sat Dec 23, 2006 5:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by clem »

Make sure you check the md5 of the ISO before you burn it. IF you're using windows you'll need to get an md5 checker:

http://www.etree.org/cgi-bin/counter.cg ... md5sum.exe

open a command line and type md5sum.exe yourfile.iso

the result should be:
f57c1935b04546ced05f4e8b3d6fdea8
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Post by Cluttermagnet »

OK, thanks! I grabbed a copy of md5sum.exe. I will check the md5 and burn my CD some time tomorrow (23 Dec).
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Post by Cluttermagnet »

DeepBurner has worked very well for me on both 98SE and XP machines. I just burned Linux Mint 2.0 and 2.1 .iso CD's. Tried to check md5sum before burning but it wouldn't work in XP. Placed the file in C:\winnt\system 32 per the website instructions, but never saw results. I must be doing something wrong with syntax in the Run command or have placed md5sum.exe in the wrong folder perhaps? I will try the .iso as live CD's at home later tonight.
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Post by Cluttermagnet »

try CDburnerXP it's FREE and it works 100% of the time.....
Thanks, I may try that one- but the only problem I was having was I couldn't verify the md5sum of the distros I downloaded. Actually my CD burning with DeepBurner went fine. I got my CD's OK.
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Post by 900i »

Cluttermagnet try this for checksum verification, it's a windows GUI app

http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/winmd5sum
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Post by Cluttermagnet »

My LinuxMint 2.1 "Bea" CD worked flawlessly as a live CD. Now I will struggle for a time, figuring out how to navigate in Linux. There is much to learn...

I have 6-8 working desktops. I think I'd better pick one and actually install Linux on it. I'm not going to try multi-booting OS's. I will just set up 1-2 dedicated Linux machines to learn on. Because I know so little about Linux, I'm very limited right now in what I can do in a Live CD environment. I know file management pretty well in Windows. Some day I will use Live CD Linux distros to fix broken Windows OS's. LOL!

One question- I have an old IBM PC with AMD K6-II CPU. It's very slow with Windows. I think it is a 266MHz machine. It has about 128-193M of RAM (I don't remember). Is that enough to work with LinuxMint? If not, I do have several P4 machines at 1.6-1.8GHz I can use instead.
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Post by Cluttermagnet »

Cluttermagnet try this for checksum verification, it's a windows GUI app

http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/winmd5sum
Thanks, 900i. I will get a copy of this and try it on my friend's XP machine (where my .iso files live right now). Would this work on my own Win98SE machines to look at the md5 sum on a burned CD copy? Or do I need to check the sum on an .iso that lives on a hard drive?
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Post by 900i »

Or do I need to check the sum on an .iso that lives on a hard drive?
Yes, thats what it's for, before you burn and waste a blank.
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Post by Cluttermagnet »

Yes, of course- but what I'm asking is whether md5sum checking is still possible after you have burned a CD (or coaster)? Or does burning that CD change the data format so that an md5sum checking program will not work on it? My CD's live here at my house. My .iso files live at another house, where I am perhaps once weekly, on average. I seem to remember having some problem checking md5 on that machine with the software I had available at that time (last week). Since then, I have been pointed towards a utility that checks md5 from within windows, rather than DOS. That other machine is an XP box.
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Post by 900i »

Don't know the answer to that, you would have to read the MD5Sum docs, sorry.
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Telkwa

Post by Telkwa »

I'm running Ubuntu on a test PC. It's only a PIII 450 MHz with 650+MB RAM under the hood. Doesn't break any records (OpenOffice takes about 20 seconds to come up) but it's reliable.

The processor speed isn't as critical as RAM. Anything less than 256 and most of the LiveCD installers get cranky. With 128 RAM it's highly unlikely that the LiveCD would work at all.

If you can't scrounge up some more RAM you might want to think about Xubuntu or some other lighterweight distro, and you'd have to use the text-based installer.

EDIT: I like md5summer for checking md5 in Windows. It's relatively easy and it works

http://www.md5summer.org/
Telkwa

Post by Telkwa »

Let me see if I can clear up the md5 questions a little bit. The .iso download is one huge file. If you're on a Windows PC you can Explore the .iso and see what I mean. One honkin' file means one md5 will be generated. That's why you can go back to your download site, look for the md5, and compare the two very easily. You can do it by hand if you want by carefully writing down the md5 from the website, then using a Windows-based md5 utility to generate an md5 checksum from your download, then comparing the two.

It's a whole different story once you've converted the .iso into a bootable CD. Now you have hundreds of files, and hundreds of md5 checksums.

There are parts of this that I don't understand, because I've run CD's thru md5Summer and gotten a few dozen md5's, not hundreds. Maybe Summer makes one md5 for each folder, I don't know. But it can be used to check CD's. Here's how.

I believe the simplest solution is to get ahold of a known-good CD. Ask your utility to scan that CD and create md5's. I imagine it's the same with any popular utility, but the only one I'm familiar with is Summer. You can ask Summer to save the results as a text file. Then you can scan a second CD and ask Summer to verify, not create, md5's. It'll ask you which numbers to verify against, you point it to the previously created file, and it'll compare the md5's from the second CD against the md5's generated from the first CD.

It would be a simple thing for a couple of folks to coordinate their efforts via this forum. One, who has a known-good CD, can generate the text file of md5's from a CD, then attach it to a post. Anyone else can then borrow that list and use it to compare the md5's generated from their CD's. You might have to use the same md5 utility, I don't know about that. I don't have a copy of Bea yet, but if I did I'd be happy to run it thru Summer and post the results. I'll have a copy in a few days and will check back here.
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Post by 900i »

Thanks very much Telkwa. :)
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Post by Cluttermagnet »

Thanks! Some good info. I will try that Summer utility.

Regarding my slow computer, it is an old IBM Aptiva E46. Runs an AMD K6-II at 266MHz. I have it jazzed up with 256M of RAM, but it still just crawls. I now plan to try a lightweight distro like Puppy or DSL with that one. It's a dog with Windows. Heh!

Meanwhile, I do own about 8 desktops; 5 out of 8 I built myself using P4 processors at 1.6-1.8 GHz with 'plenty' of RAM, usually 512M. I will make at least one of them a dedicated Linux box to learn on. Although it is 'easier' to try Live CD distros, I will need an installed OS, as I want to dig in and learn file management as I have in the Windows environment. OTOH I really don't know yet if I'm a KDE or a Gnome type (or other) until I try a few popular distros. That will come in time. I'm not afraid of learning to work with command lines. I'll just let Win98SE continue to be my 'real' OS a while longer and do the 'heavy lifting' while I'm learning Linux.

BTW I plan to keep it simple by avoiding multi-booting for now. I have read enough about that to know that it can be a real pain when it's misbehaving.
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