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I was hoping to know if Ubuntu comes with a standard way of mounting ISOs. I looked around online and found a bunch of scripts that can do it.

This to me seems like core functionality, is it offered by default in Ubuntu. If not where is the best and simplest mounter for ISOs.

Bruno Pereira
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myusuf3
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7 Answers7

23

If you prefer to keep it old school, in a terminal:

sudo mount /path/to/iso /path/to/mountpoint -o loop

This, of course, will not allow you to edit the ISO as the other mentioned tools will, but if you just need to quickly get into one and pull a few files from it, works like a charm :-)

Thomas Ward
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DreadPirateJeff
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18

Brasero which comes with Ubuntu is able to create and open (to manipulate) ISOs. If you're looking for a way to mount an ISO so it's contents are available like a "drive" you may want to use simply Right Click the ISO and choose "Open With Archive Mounter" which will mount the ISO as a drive and you should see it listed under the Places menu.

This all assumes you are using 10.04

Marco Ceppi
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7

I always used Gmount-iso to mount ISO files.

apt-get install -y gmountiso

jumpnett
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4

An alternative for quickly grabbing files off of an iso to DreadPirateJeff's solution of loopback mounting isos is the bsdtar(1) package .

sudo apt-get install bsdtar

For example, to grab the specific build information off of the Ubuntu 10.10 i386 livecd, which is contained in the /.disk/info file on the iso and dump it to STDOUT, you'd do

bsdtar -x -O -f ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso .disk/info

which would return

Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release i386 (20101007)

Given that it's a variant tar utility, you can of course extract multiple files to disk. The advantage is that you can do all the above without root privileges, unlike loopback mounts.

(Another alternative is the isoinfo(1) utility from the genisoimage package ; however, it's slightly less straightforward to use than bsdtar.)

Community
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Steve Beattie
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4

Old question, but im amazed no one mentioned the easiest method:

Open Nautilus and... double-click the .ISO file!

No need of terminal, or installing any app or script. Its default Ubuntu behaviour since (at least) 10.04 Lucid.

enter image description here

Works only with "regular" ISO images (single track, no multi-data, no sub channels), but those are the vast majority of images. For the special cases, I use AcetoneISO (already mentioned in another answer)

The local mount point nautilus uses for such mounts is located under ~/.gvfs, a hidden directory under your Home folder (you may have to hit Ctrl+H to find it when browsing in Nautilus or using Open/Save File dialogs). In the above example, the mount point is

/home/rodrigo/.gvfs/MB SUPPORT CD.ISO/

and it's thus accessible by any program, terminal, script, etc.

MestreLion
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  • It was mentioned in a comment, but I agree that this should be the first answer... – Warrick Sep 13 '11 at 12:13
  • Worth noting that you won't be able to install programs using Wine this way. – Caltor Oct 22 '12 at 16:00
  • @MestreLion I probably should have said PlayOnLinux rather than Wine. I certainly wasn't able to install MS Office 2010 without mounting it manually in Terminal anyway. – Caltor Oct 25 '12 at 11:12
  • @MestreLion If you double-click the ISO then it appears in the File Manger under Network, as opposed to under Computer or Devices when mounted manually. PlayOnLinux will only let you install from a local file, hence it won't work. I'm no Ubuntu expert but with all due respect I have tested it both ways. If you know a way to do that using the double-click Nautilus method then please post the method for the benefit of us all, myself included. – Caltor Oct 26 '12 at 13:19
  • @Caltor: it is a local mount... just browse to ~/.gvfs (it is a hidden directory under your home folder) and you will find it there :). But good point, I'll update my answer to include that – MestreLion Oct 26 '12 at 14:18
  • @Caltor i've updated the answer to clarify this, I hope this helps. If the update solves the issue, we can delete our comments afterwards – MestreLion Oct 26 '12 at 14:37
  • @MestreLion Thanks for the info on the .gvfs folder, I had no idea where it mounted. Unfortunately although Ctrl+H works in Nautilus though it doesn't seem to have any effect in the PlayOnLinux browse so it's still a no go. Maybe I should raise the Ctrl+H issue as an issue with PlayOnLinux...? – Caltor Oct 26 '12 at 18:19
  • I don't use PlayOnLinux, but Ctrl+H works not only in Nautilus, but in all standard Open/Save dialogs from all applications (try in gedit, libreoffice, etc). Maybe PlayOnLinux does not use a standard dialog? You may try to type the location directly and see if it works (like /home/youruser/.gvfs), or enable hidden directories by default in Nautilus (Under Edit > Preferences) – MestreLion Nov 02 '12 at 07:20
3

I think the easiest tool for mounting ISOs is AcetoneISO, it is very similar to DaemonTools for Windows. Give it a try :)

Steve Rubell
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    It has everything I could think of. Burning in a breeze It even offers a kind of iso-file management and easy foolprooved DVD-playback via Kaffeine! It's very convenient. – piedro Jan 06 '11 at 00:54
3

An alternative to archive-mounter is Furius ISO Mount which not only mounts ISOs but can

  • check checksums,
  • create checksums
  • call nautilus for file browsing
  • call brassero to burn to CD.

apt:furiusisomount

Richard Holloway
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