Open Source Software vs. Commercial Software:
Migration from Windows to Linux
An IT Professional's Testimonial
CDEmu (Mounting Virtual CDs, DVDs)
Tired of looking for CDs and DVDs that you want to view or play on your computer? Let me introduce you to CDEmu. This allows you to virtually mount CDs from image files. In other words, you can capture CDs to image files, store them on a hard drive, then mount them right from the files and Linux will see them as real CDs. This is great for playing old games that require you to insert a CD to play. It's simply the best product I've found, it will handle just about any CD/DVD image type there is: CUE, CDI, Blindwrite, CCD, NRG, MDS, CIF, TOC, ISO, and CD2. It took a little work to get working since I could not find any packages from Fedora for this program.
Steps for Fedora 12:
Download packages from sourceforge.net:
Build each source rpm downloaded from sourceforge with the command:
rpmbuild –rebuild rpmfile.src.rpm
You will need to build the “libmirage” package first and install, in order to build remaining packages.
The resulting rpm files will be located in: /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/*/*. Install all of the rpms in this folder:
Obtain the source for cdemu-daemon from http://cdemu.sourceforge.net. You will need to re-compile the cdemu-daemon as follows:
./configure –sysconfdir=/etc
make
make install
This will install the cdemu daemon binary as: /usr/local/bin/cdemud.
Now edit the file /etc/rc.d/init.d/, and change “/usr/bin/cdemud” to “/usr/local/bin/cdemud”.
Run GCDEmu to manage CDEmu, as an applet (add the GCDEmu applet to the Gnome bar at the top, near the clock). The “cdemu-daemon” is a SysV daemon that should be set to start at boot time, by using the ntsysv utility. See "Using CDEmu" below.
Steps for Fedora 10/11:
Download packages from sourceforge.net:
Install these packages, which are needed to build the source rpms above:
Build each source rpm downloaded from sourceforge with the command:
rpmbuild –rebuild rpmfile.src.rpm
The resulting rpm files will be located in: /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/*/*
Install these built rpms:
This finishes getting the kernel module and the whole backend system for this working.
Using CDEmu
You use the "GCDEmu" Gnome applet to manage CDEmu. On your toolbar, simply right-click and select "Add to Panel", and select "GCDEmu" from the list. To mount a CD or DVD image, simply click on the GCDEmu applet and select the entry called "Device 00: Empty", and it will prompt you to select your disc image. After you select it, it will mount the image as a real disc! This also works great for mounting CDs and DVDs for VirtualBox, as CDEmu can mount several different image types. My favorite format is bin/toc (images are kept as a file pair, a .toc file and a .bin file). Use the "cdrdao" utility to create these file pairs, with the command to read the disc in the drive to a file pair:
cdrdao read-cd --read-raw --device /dev/sr0 data.toc
This will create two files, one called "data.toc" and one called "data.bin". To mount the image with CDEmu, select the data.toc file and CDEmu will mount it.
The “cdemu-daemon” is a SysV daemon that should be set to start when the PC boots by using the ntsysv utility. This needs to be running for the GCDEmu applet to connect and work.
Note: If you upgrade the kernel, you will also need to install the "kernel-devel" package so that the vhba module will install/insert. For instance when upgrading to “kernel-PAE-2.6.27.21-170.2.56.fc10.i686.rpm”, the package “kernel-PAE-devel-2.6.27.21-170.2.56.fc10.i686.rpm” is needed as well. By default, this package will already be installed with a new Fedora installation, unless you manually upgrade the kernel.
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