Friday 4 April 2008

AcetoneISO - Daemon Tools for Linux

Linux does not really need a utility like Daemon Tools because of the generic file structure. If you need to create a virtual CD-ROM out of an ISO file, all you need to do is mount it using a single command. Same goes for dumping a folder to an ISO. But the drawback of the built-in system utilities like mount is that they only support the standard ISO format. What if you want to mount a DAA image or an NRG image ? What if you are a recent Linux convert and still prefer a GUI to a command line ?? AcetoneISO (http://www.acetoneiso.netsons.org/) is a nice GUI utility that answers all these questions.

AcetoneISO is chock-full of options for working with CD/DVD images. With one click, you can mount ISO images or play DVD-Movies from an ISO. It also supports a wide range of image formats such as bin,mdf,nrg,img,daa,dmg,cdi,b5i,bwi and pdi. However, to work with these image formats, they need to be converted to ISO format first. AcetoneISO achieves this using the free PowerISO binary. For OSS purists, this might not be the ideal solution as PowerISO is not open source. However, as far as I know, PowerISO is the only utility for Linux that supports non-ISO image formats. AcetoneISO automatically downloads the PowerISO binary when you attempt to convert a non-ISO image. So as long as you don't attempt to work with non-ISO images, AcetoneISO remains free and open-source as intended.
Other great features of AcetoneISO include:
  • Extract contents to a folder
  • Generate an ISO image of a CD/DVD
  • Generate an ISO from a folder
  • Rip PSX games for emulators
  • Backup Audio CDs
  • Extract boot images from an ISO or a CD/DVD
  • Emulate floppy drive
  • Create El-Torito bootable CDs
  • Generate/Check MD5 sums
  • Split/Merge images
  • Encrypt/Decrypt images
  • Compress/Decompress Images
  • Generate cue file files for bin
More detailed list of features can be found at http://www.acetoneiso.netsons.org/viewpage.php?page_id=1

Installation of AcetoneISO is a breeze. Binary packages are provided for Ubuntu,OpenSuSE,Mandriva, Arch and Slackware. Since I run Fedora, I had to compile the sources. Compilation is trivial and well documented in the Readme included with the source, so I am not going to repeat the instructions again.

AcetoneISO is one of the best free and open-source Linux GUI utilities I have encountered. If you regularly work with CD/DVD images, you will find AcetoneISO an indispensable utility.


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