[Gllug] creating bootable cdroms from .iso images

[Mark Preston]

Hi all,
This is a belated thankyou to Richard Cohen and Tet for their helpful 
messages relating to my previous woes. I have now created some bootable 
cdroms and I can confirm Tet's assertion :-
> > Nope. The bootableness of a CD is determined by the contents of the ISO
> > image, not by how it's written to the CD. Thus if you already have an
> > ISO image, but it's not bootable, you're pretty much out of luck.
I have found that "cdrecord -v dev=0,4,0 /path/to/file.iso" works very well 
for a bootable .iso file. However I don't know how you go about finding out 
if the file is bootable before running this command. 
The other useful, (for educational purposes), command I have found is 
"xcdroast -d 1"  which displays the commands as they are sent to the shell 
whilst using X-Cd-Roast.

I now have a number of burnt bootable CdRoms which are probably not much use 
to me including Gibraltar 0.99 (Debian based Firewall CdRom). Linux-Mandrake 
SNF 8.2 and a spare RedHat 7.3  Disk 1 Cdrom. Anybody who wants any of these 
can email me and I'll post them off.    

Richard Cohen's description of making bootable CdRoms wasn't quite what I had 
in mind when I made the posting, but I found it very interesting. 
I would like to ask how difficult it would be to take a well known distro 
like Mandrake or Redhat and then take off a few files/ add a few files to 
create a bootable cdrom with some special interest files? The reason I am 
asking is because I'm thinking that this is what, amongst other things, the 
open source project I'm involved in called OIO - Open Infrastructure for 
Outcomes should be doing to promote more uptake. One of the main problems is 
difficulty with installation which requires ideally Apache, PostgreSQL, Zope 
and the OIO package to all be installed correctly. This, for the target 
audience of medics/ healthcare workers is asking a bit much.

-- 
Regards from Mark Preston

www.markpreston.co.uk

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