Linux/Unix/BSD

If you have created an ISO image with a utility like mkisofs or have downloaded an ISO image from a website or FTP archive you can mount it on your filesystem without having to burn it to CD or DVD first. Doing this in Linux is fairly straight forward but it’s a two step process in FreeBSD.

Please note that these instructions are no longer valid for recent releases of FreeBSD because vnconfig is no longer supported. Thanks to Leif Neland for letting me know about this.

Thanks to Rollin Kibbe for supplying updated information available here.

Say for example you are wanting to mount a CD ISO image of a Linux distribution such as Fedora Core 3 Disc 1; the filename of the ISO file in this example is FC3-i386-disc1.iso This example assumes you are in the same directory as the ISO image and that the mount point (/cdrom in this example) already exists.

Mounting the ISO Image

vnconfig /dev/vn0c ./FC3-i386-disc1.iso
mount -t cd9660 /dev/vn0c /cdrom

The above mounts the CD-ROM filesystem at /cdrom and doing ls -l /cdrom will show the contents of the root level of the CD.

Unmounting the ISO Image

umount /cdrom
vnconfig -u /dev/vn0c

It is likely you will need to be the root user to issue these commands. You can either do this by su‘ing to root or by using the sudo command like so:

sudo -u root vnconfig /dev/vn0c ./FC3-i386-disc1.iso
sudo -u root mount -t cd9660 /dev/vn0c /cdrom

sudo -u root umount /cdrom
sudo -u root vnconfig -u /dev/vn0c

One of my Linux CD Mall customers emailed me the other day with a Linux annoyance: "The computer always booted into Linux by default if I wasn’t quick enough to stop it. Most annoying. I would have preferred the computer to wait until I told it where to boot but could not find a way of doing that. All of the Linux distros that I tried just take over without being asked." This post looks at how you can change the grub boot loader’s settings to solve this issue using a text editor. And I agree with him, it is annoying how the boot loader is often set up by default to boot into Linux too quickly.

Man page for the unix linux bsd command chmod. NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION STICKY FILES STICKY DIRECTORIES OPTIONS AUTHOR REPORTING BUGS COPYRIGHT SEE ALSO NAME chmod – change file access permissions SYNOPSIS chmod [OPTION]… MODE[,MODE]… FILE… chmod [OPTION]… OCTAL-MODE FILE… chmod [OPTION]… –reference=RFILE FILE… DESCRIPTION This manual page documents the GNU version of chmod. chmod changes …

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The ext3 filesystem is a Linux filesystem with journalling capabilities. I’m always forgetting the command I need to run to format a partitition with the ext3 file system so have posted this article so I always have a easy to find reference for it… The example used here is done on the command line, and not using a GUI tool.