ISO vs .tar
Hello! I would appreciate it if someone could help me out with a problem I'm having with my SuSE Professional 9.1 machine. It's an...
No. You don't have to.
Linux's utilities will happily burn any binary image (be it ISO, e2fs, FAT or even a .tar.bz2 file) onto a CD, and the Linux CDROM driver will happily read that binary image back. Thedev-cdrom thing doesn't care whether the image is ISO or e2fs or FAT or .tar.bz2. You can easily retrieve the image back with 'dd'. Only 'mount' cares about it, but then, mount doesn't care whether it is a CD driver or a hard drive or a USB drive or a RAM disk. If you like, you can burn an XFS onto a CD-R and then mount it as "-t xfs". Or you can mkisofs and put it onto a USB drive with the 'dd' command. Linux does make the physical storage device and the filesystem image ORTHOGONAL. So, you can combine any block storage device with any filesystem (or just a binary image).
Of course, if you want the read back the CD contents on an inferior OS which can't unrelate storage device and filesystem-image type, then you MUST burn an ISO filesystem onto a CD-R. There is no such restriction on Linux. The restriction is on the inferior OS.
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