i need to install DSL onto a usb pen drive but cant figure out how to extract a .img file. How do i extract it?

an img file is a straight image (bits and bytes) of a device, most often

to get it onto your usb pen drive, you will need to determine the hardware path to your usb pen drive, not the mounted location

i think if you run mount and look for your usb device, it should say "/dev/____" mounted on "/mnt/_____"

you want the /dev/ one

then run the following

cat image.img > /dev/_____

this will wipe out everything on your pen drive, wait till the command is completely done

You usually don't "install" or "extract" an .img file, you mount it.

Exactly what sort of image file are you working with?

Generally, to see what's in an .img you do something like this:

mount -o loop image.img /mnt/<mountpoint>

but some image files (initrd.img for example) are gzipped and you have to gunzip them first. Never heard of catting an image to a dev file. Maybe you can (there are a lot of things I haven't heard of ) but I would think you would run into trouble if the image wasn't of the same size and type of device.

yes, you would run into size issues if they werent the same size, but the proper way to put an image file onto a disk is to cat it

for instance, when your making boot floppies, cat bootdisk.img > /dev/fd0 will copy the boot disk image to the floppy device

--adam

That's what I like about these linux boards, I always seem to learn something new. But what I'm wondering is for what sort of .img file would it be appropriate to write an .img to a usb pen drive in order to install DSL? Seems like a very odd (and probably wrong) thing to do. Unless one were storing a .img file on the drive to transfer to somewhere else. In which case catting would be wrong. And would blow the format of the pendrive???

Regards,
Kevin

yea, i was wondering the same thing, if your worried about screwing up the formatting of your pen drive, before catting the image to the pendrive, you can cat the pendrive to an image file, therefore backing up the formatting of it

cat /dev/____ > pendrive.img

then your pendrive is stored in the .img file, then you can go through the instructions i told you before, then when your done, get the original pendrive format back by cat pendrive.img > /dev/____

but just to install dsl? that seems a little extreme, to install dsl, it depends on what your doing, but most dsl modems hooked up with a network cable are automatic

also, check to see the size of the image file, if its somewhere around or below 1.4mb, its probably meant to go on a floppy, in which case catting that image to a floppy is more acceptable

cat image.img > /dev/fd0

but whatever

--adam

ok, so what would the mount point be? friend of mine sent me an img he created on his mac. I'm hung up on how do burn it to a DVD we can play on the TV.