Hi, running Mint Olivia and it has default disk image mounter for ISO image downloads, is this like Unetbootin and is it good?

Hi there,

hm, has it? I regret I'm not quite sure what you mean.
Are we talking about a handler for ISO image files in the GUI file manager? I think we must be, because usually you would mount an ISO image simply with

from the console.

Quite sure not. Unetbootin is a tool for making bootable USB media (thumb drive, SD cards) from ISO CD or DVD images of bootable discs, but not for mounting them. It's something altogether different.

[X] Doc CPU

There are a few ways to mount an ISO. A common way is how Doc CPU suggested. Many newish distro's offer a simple way in gui to right click or such to mount an optical disc image so that one can read files. Most do not break the read only concept.

Think of the iso image as any type of single file that contains other data. Tar'd files or gzipped or zip and other compressed filesystems like aufs and squashfs and even higher level like compressed btrfs all use some way to use a mount of some kind to allow access within the file or filesystem.


When you use unetbootin or other apps like that, it can take the files within an iso and copy them to a usb. We know that if we were to write an iso image to a disc, we'd then be able to view files if the disc was originally in a format that can be read. Unetbootin is not used to mount iso images. It is used to take an iso image and make a usb flash drive.