Getting DSL From the Mirrors
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Contents |
What you need
- A working internet connection
- Any Web Browser
- A FTP client (if your browser doesn't support FTP protocol and you want to use a FTP mirror)
If nothing else, you can always Buy a CD!!
How to get DSL from the mirrors
Navigate to http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/download.html.
There you will see some text that says something like this.
Current md5sum:
95383f523ae7a24f9ff085c021ccf11e dsl-3.3.iso
The long alphanumeric string is a checksum number, which we will deal with later. the dsl-x.x.x.iso file is what we are looking for. However, each mirror may have its own md5 hash so be sure to open the text file on the mirror containing the correct hash, e.g., dsl-x.x.XXX.iso.md5.txt.
Choose one of the mirrors listed, and navigate to the "current/" directory.
You should see the dsl-x.x.x.iso file that was listed on the Download page, if you don't, go back on your browser and choose another mirror.
Once you find the correct file, download it. It may take a while on a slow connection.
Once the download is complete, you will need to md5sum it, to make sure you got the whole file.
In Linux, do this:
md5sum <filename>
In Windows, you will need to download a program to do MD5 testing.
Probably the best program for this purpose is MD5summer or HashTab, which gives you a nice GUI to use. You can also use md5sum.exe (a command-line program), but I'll leave googling for that to you.
As an example: run md5summer, then use its GUI to navigate to your your downloaded file folder, then click on 'create sum', select your image file, click on 'add' then click 'ok' to create an md5 hash. Compare the calculation to the one retrieved from the same download site as file dsl-x.x.XXX.iso.md5.txt.
You should get back the EXACT same 32 character string you saw on the Download page. If it's not EXACTLY the same, your download was corrupted, and you will need to download the file again.
Or, if you have Firefox, you can use download manager DownThemAll!. In the popup window, where you have to choose whether you want to open or save the file, select "DownThemAll!". You'll get another window where you can type in the md5sum and much more. After the download had finished the addon automatically checks if the file had been downloaded properly. If not you'll get an error message.
Once you are done, move on to Burning a Bootable CD or use Qemu!
How to get DSL with Metalink
Metalinks contain mirrors and checksums and are read by download managers. This usually makes the download process faster and simpler. The md5sum process is automated, so you won't need to do that.
First you need a download manager that supports Metalink. aria2 (Unix, Windows, command line interface, GPL) and wxDownload Fast (Unix, Windows, GUI, GPL) are recommended. For other platforms there are: Orbit Downloader (Windows), GetRight (Windows) and Speed Download (Mac).
Then you need a Metalink for DSL. These are available from http://www.metalinker.org/samples.html
With aria2, you would use the command (other clients will vary):
aria2c http://www.metalinker.org/samples/DamnSmallLinux-3.2.metalink
In case it didn't work out
Sometimes, you'll lose your download connection, a server will crash, or your cat will unplug the router. If you're on slow connection, you might consider trying to fix your corrupted ISO download rather than starting over.
