You can mount an ISO image onto your operating system instead of burning it onto a CD or a DVD. This can come handy and easy in situations and there you have the advantage of not wasting a media. A classic example would be when setting up a Jumpstart setup.

Let’s say that we have a ISO image of a CD named opensuse.iso in the directory /software

To mount it

opensuse11:~ # mount -o loop /software/opensuse.iso /mnt

where /mnt is the mount point.

This is equivalent to

opensuse11:~ # mount -t iso9660 -o loop /software/opensuse.iso /mnt

Now you can browse the contents of the ISO image by changing directory to /mnt

opensuse11:~ # cd /mnt

This should mount the ISO image. While this article is focussed on SUSE Linux and openSUSE, should work on most of the linux distributions including Ubuntu Fedora.

If you are looking for a way to mount an ISO image in Sun Solaris or openSolaris click here