GtkHash For Linux

GtkHash is an open source and free graphical software implemented in C around the GTK+ toolkit and designed from the offset to be used as a desktop utility for computing checksums and message digests. It makes use of the powerful mhash library.

At the moment, GtkHash supports all the important hash functions, includin MD5, WHIRLPOOL, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512, HAVAL, RIPEMD, and TIGER. The main supported platform is Linux, but it should also work with other POSIX compliant operating systems.

Optional requirements include zlib, Linux kernel 2.6.38 (with CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API_HASH), libcrypto, libgcrypt, PolarSSL, NSS, Nettle, mhash, Nautilus, Thunar, and Nemo.

Its graphical user interface (GUI) has a simple designed and it’s intuitive. All you have to do is to select the file for which you want to verify the checksum by clicking on the ‘File’ button, as well as to enter the original hash in the ‘Check’ box.

Press the ‘Hash’ button to generate MD5, SHA1 and SHA256 checksums. If the original hash is identical with one of the generated checksums, you will see a verified signed next the ‘Check’ box and the respective checksum field.

From the View menu you can choose between File, Text and File List view modes, and from the Preferences dialog you’ll be able to add support for more hash functions in the main window, including MD6-256, MD6-512, ADLER32, MD6-224, MD6-384, as well as CRC32.

Another interesting feature is the ability to change the digest format. Available options include Lowercase Hexadecimal, Uppercase Hexadecimal and Base64. Hashes can be easily saved to a text file by using the built-in ‘Save As’ function implemented in the ‘File’ menu item.

Taking a look under the hood of GtkHash, we can notice that the program is written entirely in the C programming language and uses the cross-platform GTK+ GUI toolkit for its graphical user interface. It can be installed on any distribution of Linux, as well as on the FreeBSD operating system, supporting 32-bit and 64-bit hardware platforms.