ISO support - where is it?

[shag00]

I thought ISOs were old hat and easy to read in any fairly modern OS. Failing that I thought there would be many 3rd party providers but WOW was I wrong. I have been unable to locate anything that can open a multi sector ISO at all, much less stick a right click menu entry in Dolphin that works. KDE services appear to be unmaintained and the collection of crap that is tossed into the KDE services web area is not only confusing but does not work with 19.10. The only popular program I have not tried is CDEmu and only because it can't be downloaded through Launchpad at the moment for reasons unknown. Has anyone been able to overcome this problem?

[Don B. Cilly]

Ark should see and uncompress any ISO.
For a right click menu entry in Dolphin, I made a "Mount ISO" service menu a while ago that might be useful.
mkisofs also works from the CL.

[jglen490]

Don B. is correct. Ark will open an ISO, from Dolphin using a right click/"Open With ..." selection, and properly display its contents. Is there something else beyond looking inside that you need to do?

[Don B. Cilly]

Oops. I linked the wrong service menu.

That was the Make ISO (of a directory) one.
For mounting it, try:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Service
ServiceTypes=KonqPopupMenu/Plugin
MimeType=application/x-cd-image;model/x.stl-binary
Actions=mount;unmount;
X-KDE-Priority=TopLevel
X-KDE-StartupNotify=false
Icon=application-x-cd-image
X-KDE-Submenu=Mount/unmount image

[Desktop Action unmount]
Name=Unmount
Icon=edit-redo
Exec=which fuser fusermount; if [ "$?" != "0" ];then kdialog --icon=ks-error --title="Unmount ISO-9660 Image" --passivepopup="[Error] Please install fuser and fusermount command and try again."; exit 1; else fuser -k %f; fusermount -u "$(ls "%f"|sed 's/.iso$//')"; rm -fr "$(ls "%f"|sed 's/.iso$//')"; kdialog --icon=ks-media-optical-umount --title="Unmount ISO-9660 Image" --passivepopup="[Finished] $(basename %f) unmounted.";fi

[Desktop Action mount]
Name=Mount
Icon=circular-arrow-shape
Exec=which fuseiso; if [ "$?" != "0" ];then kdialog --icon=ks-error --title="Mount ISO-9660 Image" --passivepopup="[Error] Please install fuseiso command and try again."; exit 1; else ~/bin/iso_manager-mount-image.sh %F;fi

[claydoh]

It may depend on if the file is a true iso, or perhaps using an old format (like udf, maybe?), or is protected. Multi-sector is the key phrase here.

As to CDEmu, did you have add the PPA with current packages for most all Ubuntu versions?
https://launchpad.net/~cdemu/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

[jglen490]

Maybe the OP will come back and give some insight into what he is looking for, or trying to do.

[shag00]

Thank you very much for your replies gentlemen and in response:

@Don B. Cilly & jglen490 seems like my problem, should do but does not.

@Don B. Cilly I ran into the fuser and fusermount issue yesterday, there are no packages in Muon by those names to be installed.

@claydoh I describe the ISO as Multi sector because when I tried to open the ISO with Acetoneiso it came back and said it did not support Multi sector ISOs. Further investigation indicated that there is no standard defining what an ISO is and it remains unclear to me what multi sector actually is although people who know about these things recognise the term.

In relation to CDEmu I contacted the maintainer who was able to steer me in the right direction but acknowledged that there appears to be some issue with the search functionality in Muon, Discovery or Launchpad. I had the correct PPA in in my sources but Muon and Discovery cannot find CDEmu.

@jglen490 "I have been unable to locate anything that can open a multi sector ISO...", I am not sure there is much I can add to this statement other than perhaps substituting "anything" with "a program" and "open" with "read".

In Windows this is the program I use https://www.elby.ch/en/products/vcd.html . The most important issue is being able to read the ISO, the right click menu is nice to have but does not stop my work flow dead in it's tracks.

I did come across work arounds for multi sector but they involved access to the Fuse group which has not been used for years. Really the problem is that very little to no work has been done in this area for the best part of a decade by the KDE team or 3rd party providers and its starting to show.

[jglen490]

This seems to be an old problem, and not necessarily related to Kubuntu alone. I found this thread at LinuxQuestions, probably not your exact problem, but close.

[shag00]

I don't know if multi sector is the same as multi session as this post infers and the problem in that post is that he can access some data but not the music files whereas I cannot open/read the ISO at all.

[Don B. Cilly]

I can't remember how I installed fusermount. Since I dislike using Muon or Discover, I probably just typed it in a console and it told me try apt install this or that.

Anyway, I looked around the block a bit, and I read that... mount -t iso9660 -o loop works for multi-sector ones.
Now, assuming your ISO has a .iso or compatible extension, (and considering that mount you must have ;·) try
mkdir ~/.local/ISO/ (or make it with Dolphin)
Save this in ~.local/share/kservices5/ServiceMenus/

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Service
X-KDE-ServiceTypes=KonqPopupMenu/Plugin
MimeType=application/x-cd-image;model/x.stl-binary
Actions=miso;
Encoding=UTF-8
Icon=application-x-cd-image

[Desktop Action miso]
Name=Mount ISO
Icon=edit-redo
Exec=pkexec mount -t iso9660 -o loop %F ~/.local/ISO; kdialog --title="Mount ISO" --passivepopup="Mounted";fi

as mountiso.desktop or whatever.desktop.
Restart Dolphin, and under Actions... it should mount your ISO to ~/.local/ISO.
It works for me on a Kubuntu Live ISO, I don't have any multi-sectors ones to try...

[shag00]

Thanks for your effort Don but I have been unsuccessful, created the new directory and file but all I get is the menu entry in actions but never anything in ~/.local/ISO, either a normal ISO or the multi sector one. As this is just a copy and paste action I can't think what the issue is.

[Don B. Cilly]

Hmm.
What happens if you run
sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop <whateveryourisoiscalled> ~/.local/ISO
in a console? Any errors?

[shag00]

Don,
the result was:
mount: /home/scott/.local/ISO: failed to setup loop device for test.iso.

[claydoh]

Can we ask what the file is, were it came from, what created it?
what is the result of this command:

file the-name-if-the-file.iso

You need to be in the dir where the file is, which you can do in Dolphin, then hit f4 to open a konsole tab there. Else type in the full path to the file. This will show some file info, as in Linux the extension does not necessarily determine the type of file.

As to cdemu, have you tried installing it using apt? The packaging in the PPA is likely missing the metadata that some package managers like Discover need.

If you don't have the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cdemu/ppa


Then
sudo apt update
sudo apt install cdemu

[shag00]

AH!

test.iso is just a small video file while test1.iso is the multi sector iso.

sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop test.iso ~/.local/ISO mounts the image in ~/.local/ISO

sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop test1.iso ~/.local/ISO returns:
mount: /home/scott/.local/ISO: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.

Re CDEmu, as I said previously I contacted the site maintainer who advised how to download the program by following this advice:
Muon does list the CDEmu packages, but for some reason search seems to be broken. But if you set your filters (tabs on the left) to "By Category -> All" and "By Origin -> "PPA for CDEmu", it should list only CDEmu packages.

I tested CDEmu and it also does not support multi sector.