FOSSwire

There are a few occasions when you may need or want to use an ISO image without actually burning it. You may want to grab a file off of a CD, or maybe you’re storing an image of a disk for use in Wine. Using mount points, this is an easy task.

The Quick Way

On a recent GNOME desktop, opening or mounting ISO images (and other archives) is very simple. Simply right-click the image, and select Open With > Archive Mounter. Done! The image will show as a drive in Places or on your desktop.

This is the easiest way to grab a file from an image or an archive without having to open an archive manager or extract everything. But, it has its limitations. Because it is mounted under GVFS, it is typically only available on a GNOME desktop. Wine may also have trouble understanding where the image was mounted to as well, and reconfiguring Wine every time you want to change discs is no fun.

The More Reliable Way

Almost as quickly as the previous solution, you can mount the image in a terminal:

sudo mount -o loop /path/to/image.iso /media/cdrom

We’re using the CD drive location here to keep things simple: GNOME and Wine will both think that it is just a normal CD or DVD. The location of your CD drive on your filesystem may differ; check your distribution documentation for details. The -o loop option is needed because image.iso is not a block device, as the mount command would expect, but a file.

To remove the mount point again, point the umount command at the location of the CD drive:

sudo umount /media/cdrom

Bonus: The Graphical More Reliable Way

If you find yourself swapping disk images out frequently, you may find Gmountiso useful. You can easily swap out multiple images and mount points, and it works in the same manner as the mount/umount commands do.

SystemRescueCD, which I covered very recently has just released version 1.0.1.

The new version features JWM as the window manager to replace WindowMaker, updates much of the included software to the latest versions (including Gparted), includes some new features and fixes several bugs.

• Using JWM-2.0.1 as default Window-Manager instead of Window-Maker
  
• Using unionfs-2.2.4 as the root filesystem (all files are now writable)
  
• Updated sys-block/gparted to 0.3.6 (add support for the labels)
  
• Updated squashfs to 3.3 (with LZMA compression) to save space
  
• Updated sys-fs/ntfsprogs to 2.0.0 since it's marked as stable in gentoo
  
• Updated sys-fs/ntfs3g to 1.2310 (ntfs full read-write support)
  
• Updated the Memtest86+ floppy disk image to 2.01
  
• Updated the btrfs filesystem support to 0.13 (kernel patch and utils)
  
• Updated the default kernel to Linux-2.6.24.04 with Reiser4 (rescuecd + rescue64)
  
• Updated app-cdr/cdrkit-1.1.7.1 (Fix for Joliet directory length bug)
  
• Added sys-apps/ipmitool (Utility for controlling IPMI enabled devices)
  
• Added missing crypto modules in the default kernel (rescuecd + rescue64)
  
• Added skipmount=/dev/xxx option that prevents the system from mounting a device
  
• Replaced cryptsetup-luks with cryptsetup-1.0.5
  
• Autodetect software raid volumes at boot time using 'mdadm --auto-detect'
  
• Fixed an autorun bug introduced in 1.0.0: no stdout for interactive scripts

• Fixed bugs in the network configuration boot options (ethx, gateway, dns)
  
• Fixed problems with udhcpc client when multiple ethernet interfaces exists
  
• Prevents multiple setkmap when "sysresccd-custom setkmap" used several times
  

The full release notes are here, and the live CD can be downloaded from the site.

K3B is an application that ships in the default KDE packages in most distributions, however it's a very useful tool that can often be overlooked.

K3B is a CD and DVD burning application that makes it easy to burn data, audio and disc images onto writable CDs and DVDs. It is a very mature, stable and fully featured application.

Open up K3B and you are presented with a split view, with directories listed on the left in a tree structure, the current directory's contents on the right and a welcome page at the bottom.

On selecting a task, such as creating a data CD, the bottom view turns into a view of the files that will be on your CD (data, in this case, but obviously it will be different for audio and other projects). You then drag and drop files from the filesystem into your project as it's called. Once you're done, you can Burn the project.

The whole burning process is very clear and should be easy for anyone familiar burning CDs with software such as Nero over on Windows to pick up and understand.

There are also options for burning images and doing 1-to-1 disc copies available from the Tools menu.

One of the main benefits of K3B is that it is such a mature project. While the tree-like interface might not be to everyone's tastes and it does occasionally seem a little outdated, the application is simple to use and intuitive for people who have used other burning software before elsewhere. It is extremely stable in my experience, and it gets the job done.

For KDE users, K3B is highly recommended for an easy, yet powerful way to burn data, audio and more to disc. GNOME users may want to try Gnomebaker, and if you're into using the command line, give cdrecord a try.