Red Hat Knowledgebase

ISO files are whole disk images. They are a single image file that are used for burning to CD-ROM. Red Hat provides Update releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as ISO files. The Updates of Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be downloaded from Red Hat Network (RHN).

For example, if you have downloaded a file from RHN it will look similar to rhel-3-U3-i386-as-disc1.iso. To view the contents of a .iso file you need to mount the file as a loopback device. To do this use the following command:

mount -o loop /path/to/rhel-3-U3-i386-as-disc1.iso /mount/point

An example of where this can be useful could be when setting up an installation server. Download the required .iso files from RHN mount them as loopback, copy all the files to a central repository, and perform an NFS installation.

For further information on loopback devices and how to download .iso files from RHN please see additional articles in the Knowledgebase.