MD5 Sums

MD5 Sums are used to verify the integrity of a file you have downloaded from the internet. Most commonly with ISO images for linux distributions. The site you download from will also publish the MD5 sum of the ISO image. After you download it you can find the MD5 sum using the command...

$md5sum filename

The output will look something like...

bbd21ded02c06b41c59485266833937a

compare this to the published number. If they match, your file is intact. If not, it is corrupted in some way. Try downloading it again. This is especially important to do if you use bit torrent downloads.