[conspire] Special thanks to Eric De Mund

[Eric De Mund]

Rick, All,

] Very shortly after the latest Ubuntu release (v. 7.10 "gutsy gibbon"),
] I was surprised and delighted to come home to find a carefully padded
] mailing from CABAL regular Eric De Mund: It was a very thoughtful set
] of Ubuntu 7.10 CDs and one DVD in jewel cases, with a nice note of ex-
] planation.
] 
] Eric, you're a prince. Thank you. Your CDs were left prominently out
] during the most recent CABAL meeting, the one I couldn't attend be-
] cause I was at a memorial gathering. I hope and expect that they were
] appreciated by those present. I certainly appreciated your kind gift.

I'm sorry to hear about the memorial service.

You're most welcome, and thank you for the compliment. I'm glad to hear
the small offering may have been or may yet be useful to you. Though
princely is more, to me, someone who opens his home to others, month
after month, year after year.

The DVD was an Ubuntu install/live DVD:

    PC (Intel x86) install/live DVD

    For almost all PCs. This includes most machines with Intel/AMD/etc
    type processors and almost all computers that run Microsoft Windows,
    as well as newer Apple Macintosh systems based on Intel processors.
    Choose this if you are at all unsure.

, burned from the 4.2G iso file:

    ubuntu-7.10-dvd-i386.iso

, that I found tucked away on this web page:

    Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)
    http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/releases/7.10/release/

FYI, this evening I was finally successful for the first time in getting
the correct MD5 checksum from the burned DVD. This invocation won't work:

    % # wrong
    % dd if=/dev/cdrom | md5sum --binary
    8880192+0 records in
    8880192+0 records out
    4546658304 bytes (4.5 GB) copied, 453.326 seconds, 10.0 MB/s
    8315258cdfb916b01f129b6598b72bc9 *-
    % 
    
, but this following one will. Note that the iso file ubuntu-7.10-dvd-
i386.iso is 4,546,652,160 bytes or 10240*4440090 bytes in length, and so
you want to read exactly that many bytes off of the DVD. (If you don't
have this file at hand, its length is reported at the beginning of a
wget of the file from ubuntu.com.)

    % # right
    % dd if=/dev/cdrom bs=10240 count=444009 | md5sum --binary
    444009+0 records in
    444009+0 records out
    b5d9aaa45af862b4c804530734216a15 *-
    4546652160 bytes (4.5 GB) copied, 413.394 seconds, 11.0 MB/s
    % 

I wonder if 4,546,658,304 bytes (6144 more bytes than the 4,546,652,160
bytes of the iso file) got burned to the DVD because that larger number
is an exact multiple of 32K (32,768).

Cheers,
Eric
--
"As a child I understood how to give, I have forgotten this grace since
I have become civilized." --Chief Luther Standing Bear

Eric De MUND   | Ixian Systems           | Jab: eadixian at jabber.org/main
ead at ixian.com  | 650 Castro St, #120-210 | Y!M: ead0002
ixian.com/ead/ | Mountain View, CA 94041 | ICQ: 811788