Instead of burning .iso images to CD’s or DVD’s all the time, under Linux you can mount the .iso files, and easily access the data within the image. This obviously wont help if you want to burn a bootable cd, but its very handy if you quickly need to access some files within the image, without burning a CD/DVD.
Mounting a .iso image file:
# mount /path/to/cdimage.iso /mnt/cdmount -o loop,ro
Prefix the above command with “sudo” if you are not using an account with root privileges, or use “su” to gain root access. This will depend on the Linux distribution used.
Make sure the mount point (“/mnt/cdmount” in the example above) exists before trying to mount the image file.
This will mount the CD/DVD image “/path/to/cdimage.iso” to the folder “/mnt/cdmount”, and mounts it using the loop back option, as well as being read only.
When you are finished using the image, you need to unmount it.
Unmounting the image file:
# umount /mnt/cdmount
Again, this must be run with root privileges.
Simply use the mount point you want to unmount as the only parameter to umount.
If you have forgotten where you mounted it to, you can simply run “mount” to get a listing of all current mounted filesystems.