AcetoneISO: Easily mount CD/DVD Images in Linux

AcetoneISO is an application that uses Fuse (Filesystem in Userspace) in order to mount ISO, NRG, BIN, MDF, IMG and various other disk images.

AcetoneISO 2.2.2 in Kubuntu

Among the nice features AcetoneISO provides are:

- integration with KDE, GNOME, Xfce and LXDE (by integrating with the default file managers of these desktop environments - Dolphin, Nautilus, Thunar and PCManFM)
- support to mount ISO, NRG, BIN, MDF and IMG images
- convert different types of images to ISO
- extract image content to a directory
- generate ISO image from folder or the CD/DVD drives
- system tray integration


By default, AcetoneISO creates empty directories in $HOME/virtual_drives/, in which it mounts the images. You can browse these directories to access the contents of any mounted disk image.

AcetoneISO also uses mencoder (which will have to be installed manually, since it's only a 'suggest' dependency - at least in Ubuntu) in order to rip DVDs to Xvid, download YouTube videos, or convert FLV videos to AVI, or extract audio from a video file, for which you will have to manually install ffmpeg.

I noticed that AcetoneISO crashes with a segmentation fault when trying to use one of the options 'Erase CD-RW' or 'Erase DVD+RW' and there is no disk in the drive.

The configuration dialogue allows you to set up a disk image database, select which video player to use for playing DVD images or enable and disable the system tray.

Except for the few bugs (and the occasional crashes), AcetoneISO may be a good choice for those who like GUI more than the command line.

Mount CD/DVD Images (ISO/BIN/NRG) Using AcetoneISO2 in Debian and Ubuntu

AcetoneISO is a graphical application written in Qt4 which lets you mount CD/DVD images easily. The formats supported are ISO, NRG, MDF, BIN and IMG. It does not come in Debian repositories, but I will show you how to easily install, run and start to use it.

Installation in Debian Lenny
Follow the steps below:

1. Install the dependencies
As root, install the following packages:

apt-get install fuse-utils fuseiso libqt4-gui pinentry-qt

In Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope you may also need package p7zip-full:

apt-get install p7zip-full

2. Make a symbolic link from /bin/fusermount to point at /usr/bin/fusermount
As root, type:

ln -s /usr/bin/fusermount /bin/fusermount

3. Download the DEB package
Download the Debian .DEB package from the official website, here. At the time of writing there are two releases available, 2.0.2 and 2.0.3 RC1. I tested this for 2.0.2 and it works on both Debian Lenny and Ubuntu.

4. Install the package
Make sure the current working directory is the one where you saved the DEB package, and type as root:

dpkg -i acetoneiso_2.0.2-0~getdeb1_i386

Notice that the name may be changed, so replace it with the proper name in that case.

5. Add your user to the fuse group
The next step you will need to follow is to add your username to the group fuse. In order to do that, run as root:

addgroup your_username fuse

And replace your_username with the user you are using.

That's it. AcetoneISO2 should be now properly installed. To remove it, use dpkg -r acetoneiso2 as root.

Running AcetoneISO
AcetoneISO can be used not only to mount and unmount images, but to create images from CDs/DVDs or convert various image formats to ISO, rip DVDs to Xvid (never tried it, so I can't tell how it handles quality factors, subtitles, audio etc). Just look under the Utilities, Conversion and Video! menus.

Screenshot of AcetoneISO2 2.0.2 with a mounted Ubuntu ISO image

As a side note, I consider the simplest way to mount images this one:

mount -o loop /path/to/image.iso /path/to/mount/point/

As root. And you can also use the nrg2iso and iat tools to convert between various image formats.

Have some other suggestions? Or maybe some other ways or tools (maybe including context menus in Nautilus or Konqueror) to manipulate images? Please share it in the comments below.

Related articles
Tip of the Day: Convert NRG Images to ISO

Updated: March 31, 2009