I mounted a loop image in my computer in /media/image, and now I want to install software in the image with apt-get. Is it possible?

I'd mount the image in a virtual machine myself.

When you say you mounted some image it also may or may not be a type that can easily be modified. If an iso image you'd have to undo the cd dvd and edit it and then remake it to a iso.

Normally when you say you loop mounted some deal it means that it is only now some collection of files attached to a mount point rather than a system running from that mount point.

It may be possible to boot a system to some compressed image or so too.


I'd go back to mounting the image as a read write hard drive in a virtual machine. Qemu would be easy enough usually.

I tend to just replicate the linux install on the iso to a usb stick. Make it bootable with a bootloader and a custom /etc/fstab to represent it's new home. rsync, tar, cp, and other means to facilitate that bootable linux install method. Just bear in mind that the 2GB iso image might expand to 8GB on a usb stick. It's probably simpler and easier to do that with virtualization. I tend not to because most of my tech is so old that the performance hit of virtualization is not a trivial thing.

For example with an avlinux6.0.3-xfce410-pae-i386-en.iso image:

# mount -o loop -t iso9660 avlinux6.0.3-xfce410-pae-i386-en.iso /mnt/loop
# mount -t squashfs /mnt/loop/live/filesystem.squashfs /mnt/squashfs
# cd /mnt/squashfs
# ls
(and you'll see a familiar root / filesystem of a bootable linux)

And clone the bootable root filesystem to whatever boot medium. A little creative bootloader config (/etc/fstab + /boot/grub/grub.cfg), a minimal chroot to set a password for root and a user account on the root filesystem, so you can login without getting familiar with distro defaults. Reboot and you're running that former iso image as a bootable and booted into linux. Package manager away at this point.