Last night, I ended up hacking on the usplash and casper codebases
until about 0500 (local time) in the morning (mostly due to the
developer status meeting at 0200 UTC).
usplash had a fairly icky bug where it would choke and die if the fifo filled up and it got “incomplete” commands. No longer, it now uses a buffer which it fills up and then processes, handling partial commands and such correctly.
casper-md5check is a tool which does md5summing according to a list of
files, similar to the regular md5sum program, but with one notable
exception: it does progress information through usplash. So, since the
live CD has a huge file which is the compressed live file system, just
doing a per-file progress bar would be silly and inaccurate. It
therefore does a size-based progress bar which looks quite neat.
If the debian-cd config has already been updated, just pulling down today’s daily cd and choosing “integrity check” should show you the nice little hack.