In Linux, you don't need to burn a CD or DVD image to a disc to take a look at its contents. Since "everything's a file", it's just a matter of mounting it.

ISO images -- from which CDs and DVDs are traditionally burnt -- are interesting (and useful!) because the don't just contain files but also the filesystem metadata. (That's stuff like boot code, filesystem structures and file attributes.) It means you can download a single file -- like the latest version Ubuntu -- and create an independently bootable operating system just by writing it to a disc.

So do you mount an ISO file?

mount -o loop  image_file.iso  /mnt/image

Simple as that!

(Of course you do need to be root to mount things. Ubuntu users should prefix that command with sudo. And you need a place to mount the image. I did that with the command mkdir /mnt/image -- also as root.)

Once it's mounted, you're free to browse it via any GUI-based browser.

ISOs are a brilliant way of backing things up. How? Again, it's really simple...

dd  if=/dev/hda1  of=/image_file.iso

where if indicates the input file and of the output file.

Note that dd requires a device address, not a directory. Imagine you're using a spare HDD for backups and have it mounted as /media/backups. A df -h lists it as...

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on 
/dev/hdb1              37G  177M   35G   1% /media/backups

Executing dd if=/media/backups of=backups.iso will return an error saying that /media/workspace is a directory. So execute dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=backups.iso instead. It'll work fine.

<--Previous Hidden Linux        Next Hidden Linux -->