Download
Download the image, then check it.
The image is one file of several gigabytes. Checking its fingerprint takes a single command, and it tells you whether your copy is identical to ours.
Get the image
There is one image, and it carries every edition. What gets written to the disk is the free Community base; the edition you paid for is added at the end of the installation.
Downloading needs no account. The account is asked later, by the installer.
- Open the download page on cyclop-tech.com
- Start the download and leave it alone until it finishes
- Keep the file where you can find it again. The Downloads folder is fine
Where the image is picked up. The fingerprint sits under the download button on the next step.
What a fingerprint is, in plain words
A fingerprint is a line of 64 characters computed from the whole file. Change a single byte anywhere in those gigabytes and the line comes out completely different. Two different files never land on the same one by accident.
So we publish ours, you compute yours, and you compare the two. Identical means your copy is our copy, byte for byte.
Where ours is written
Under the download button, with a button to copy it.
It is read from the file we publish next to the image itself, not typed into the website by hand. So it is right on the day the image is rebuilt, and it stays right afterwards.
Compute yours
Open a terminal in the folder where the file landed, and run the line that matches the system you downloaded from.
- With PowerShell: Get-FileHash .\cyclop-os-4.0.iso -Algorithm SHA256
- In a terminal that has sha256sum, which includes Cyclop OS and every Linux: sha256sum cyclop-os-4.0.iso
- In a terminal that does not have it: shasum -a 256 cyclop-os-4.0.iso
On a slow disk this takes ten to thirty seconds and prints nothing while it works. It has not frozen.
What you should see
One line of 64 letters and digits, and it matches the one on the page. Upper case or lower case makes no difference: some tools print one, some the other.
Compare the whole line, not the first few characters. Copy ours, paste it under yours, and look at the two lines together.
If it does not match
Three causes, in the order you will meet them.
- The download stopped short. By far the most common one. Look at the size of the file, then download it again rather than trying to repair it.
- You compared against a different image. We rebuild and republish, and the fingerprint is regenerated with the image. Reload the download page and take the one shown there.
- The file did not come from us. A copy found on a mirror, a forum or a shared drive is not our file, whatever it is called.
A matching fingerprint proves the download is whole and came from our server. It is not a defence against a server that has itself been broken into, since whoever replaced the image would replace the fingerprint with it. It catches the ordinary, frequent problem, which is the one you actually have.