CD and DVD ISO images

[John Summerfield]

Todd Zullinger wrote:
> David Boles wrote:
>> The specific person mentioned has no DVD drive to read a DVD of any
>> kind nor does he have Internet access of any kind. So what now?
> 
> I didn't know the premise was about the mythical man with no internet.
> For folks without net access or a dvd to boot from, I'd probably give
> them a USB key that had the dvd iso on it.  From that, they could
> extract the boot.iso, boot from that and install from the dvd iso on
> the usb key.
> 
> That's just one of many ways such a problem could be handled.  But I
> don't happen to know anyone in such a pickle, so I don't have much
> preference about how they solve their problem. :)

Mine is a particular case of a more generic problem. I can overcome my 
particular case, but I'm proposing a solution that works for more 
people, including people without great skill.

in my particular case, I have a system, Athlon XP 2200+ or so, with 
USB1.0 and a CD drive. I _can_ carry it around the place and connect it 
to a good network, but that doesn't solve this kind for everyone.

I have here a Fedora 8 DVD, it came attached to APC Magazine. If I have 
it, so have a few hundred thousand other Australians, and then there are 
those other magazines such as Linux Format and linux Magazine that also 
attach the latest Fedora (and many other distros over the course of the 
year).

Here, where I am right now, I have ADSL2+ and can download at 1.2 
Mbytes/sec or so, so downloading is not a problem. At home, though, 
broadband of any speed is not available, and nor is any machine with a 
DVD drive. My wife has a new digital camera, she needs the latest 
excellence in digital photography software.

So there are two ways I can get a DVD: off a magazine, and by downloading.

If the DVD (and the ISO DVD image) contained CD images, then I could 
easily burn a set of CDs. I could insert the DVD and burn from there. Or 
I could do something like this:
mount -o loop,ro <dvd image> /mnt/cdrom
and proceed as if I had a DVD mounted at /mnt/cdrom.

APC magazine and the others might include a script just to help burn 
CDs, it's not hard for someone with basic linux skills (IE the person 
downloading or creating a DVD image).

-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

You cannot reply off-list:-)