Making an ISO file from terminal in Ubuntu October 6, 2008

Today I discovered the mkisofs command, a general linux command not specific to Ubuntu. This command enables you to make an ISO disk image of any folder or group of files on your hard drive or external media. I used it today to make an ISO file of a CD which appears to have worked perfectly using the following command

mkisofs -o EPSON.iso /media/cdrom0

As far as i know the -0 paramater signals that we are giving the command an output file (in this case EPSON.iso) followed by the path to the cd drive which contained the CD i wanted to make an ISO from. This command has literally hundreds of paramaters which are explained better than I would even attempt here.

Launch an “explorer” window in ubuntu October 6, 2008

Thanks to my friend Dave I today learnt the command in ubuntu that would be the equivalent to

explorer.exe “E:/”

And that is…

nautilus “/media/cdrom0″

The reason for wanting to do this was i wanted to make an application launcher on the tool bar link to a location, some to network paths ( smb:// ) and some to local mount points.

As with the structure of the windows command, nautilus is a window manager as is explorer.exe on windows. Nautilus is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop and any valid path can be passed as a parameter in terminal.