My expert lives 600 miles away. I had ordered a Kubuntu bootable ISO, and used it to transform 2 machines. Both lacked the “Discover” app because not verified, blocked by default. I dropped off the smaller newer machine with him, when I was passing through, and he fixed that problem. Now I like KDE, and want to share it with family members, who need an alternative to Windows. I’m trying to just make an ISO flash drive for Kubuntu myself, that’s purported to be easy, but have no clue how to get past the verify step in the process. That includes the checksum and GPG. The instructions on the website are labeled as out of date. It does say look elsewhere. The goal, of course, is to have everything just work right out of the gate, without the need for repairs.
where did you order this bootable ISO drive?
why not just make your own?
I ordered it from Ebay, and I didn’t “just make my own”, because I needed help with the “verify” step. Still do. I reach that point, and get stalled.
yeah, you should not trust a live USB from ebay.
to make your own you need:
- a working computer (either windows or linux)
- a usb stick with nothing on it you care about
- software than can prepare a USB stick as a bootable devices (rufus or ventoy).
- to download (and verify) the ISO form the distro’s official website
once you have all that, you insert the USB stick and run the software… when it asks you for the ISO file, you point it at your verified copy sitting locally on your machine.
from there you just insert the USB into the device you want try and reboot (assuming it’s firmware is set to boot from USB)
the verification is the easiest part.
after you have downloaded the ISO file you run a program that calculates the checksum for you and you visually compare that number to the number published on the official distro’s website (usually directly under where the download link can be found).
there are fancier ways to do it but that’s the guts of it.
on the plasma desktop you can just right click on the ISO file and choose properties / checksum tab to calculate whichever checksum is needed (usually SHA256)
or you can do this in a terminal using the command sha256sum [filename]
if the numbers match then your copy is good and you can be sure it is not corrupted or spoofed.
also if you have plasma running you can use the Startup Disk Creator tool to make a bootable USB instead of having to download and configure ventoy
Yeah there are about 17,573,665,583 different tools for creating bootable media on Linux lol.
I’ve been pinging between Popsicle and the KDE ISO Image Writer tool. I use the latter for making KDE Linux usbs. Each tool you would want to use all work very well.
Thanks Skyfishgoo,
The Ebay purchase was made in frustration – all I could come up with at the time. I will try using my functional KDE machine. I’ve been making attempts with my Mint laptop, since I can get it closer to the wifi router for better bandwidth. GPG always comes up as the main stumbling block on Mint. If that part is handled automatically on Plasma, then should work out.
you should still be able to use the command line sha256sum [filename] on mint as well.
i don’t know about file properties in the mint file manager GUI, but it would be worth looking.
the linux version of ventoy should work on either distro (there is a windows version as well), there is also etcher for both windows and linux, rufus i think only works on windows.
frankly you don’t need to care about verifying file signatures nearly as much as those sorts of instructions emphasise it. the likelihood of some kind of malicious discrepancy in a disk image downloaded by a random person over https is extraordinarily low, it might as well not exist. verifying it is not worth the trouble if you don’t have the tools for it right on hand already.
Thanks again ! I used my machine running Plasma, as suggested, and it worked. Took two and a half hours because of the slow connection, but the checksum agreed, and GPG wasn’t even brought up using the KDE software. Also got a newer version, 26.04, and it works beautifully on the old slow test machine. I appreciate everyone else’s input too. Now I can offer to help family and friends that are ready to dump Windows. And use the test machine for other tests. Very happy about that.
I’ve basically never bothered to verify the download lol. I’ve never had a problem.
Thanks Trog, Your thoughts about the “verify” issue, are in agreement with what I suspected. The PGP/GPG has loomed large because I was trying to follow my expert’s advice, via emails to fix the Discover app, like he did. That lead to the undisclosed quest of making my own bootable flash drive, and discarding the one obtained from Ebay. Not a secret now. A few relevant lessons in all that. Amusing too. Robin
the main reason to verify the checksum is to ensure the file was not corrupted during the download (slow or intermittent internet connections can sometimes cause downloads to become corrupted)
if you are deploying these images to others, it’s work checking to make sure you are not setting them up for failure…
But that takes all the fun out of it! Imagine all the wacky things that could occur at scale! /s
Yeah, that does seem like a good idea for deploying at scale. Wouldn’t have thought slow internet could cause those kinds of problems.