mount an ISO image in Linux

You can mount an ISO image onto your operating system instead of burning it onto a CD or a DVD. This can come handy and easy in situations and there you have the advantage of not wasting a media. A classic example would be when setting up a Jumpstart setup.

Let’s say that we have a ISO image of a CD named opensuse.iso in the directory /software

To mount it

opensuse11:~ # mount -o loop /software/opensuse.iso /mnt

where /mnt is the mount point.

This is equivalent to

opensuse11:~ # mount -t iso9660 -o loop /software/opensuse.iso /mnt

Now you can browse the contents of the ISO image by changing directory to /mnt

opensuse11:~ # cd /mnt

This should mount the ISO image. While this article is focussed on SUSE Linux and openSUSE, should work on most of the linux distributions including Ubuntu Fedora.