I’ve come up with quite a few disc image mounters under Ubuntu lately. Some had decent amount of features and some were extremely simple yet more than capable of serving their purpose, such as “Mounty” for instance. But yesterday I accidentally found a bloody awesome, all purpose optical disc image mounter–manager (since it’s more than a mounter) called “AcetoneISO”.
This is basically a GUI (front-end) written in Qt toolkit and uses a lot of built in tools such as Cdrdao, Pzip, GenISO (command-line ISO image creator) etc. To be honest, I was blown away by its features, it lets you mount almost all popular disc image formats, burn them, split, check for defects etc it’s one heck of an app!.
Main features…
*. As said it’s designed using Qt and the Webkit toolkit and integrates extremely well with Ubuntu’s Unity desktop.
*. Supports integration with popular file managers such as: Nautilus, Thunar, Dolphin and LXDE PCman.
*. Supports image formats such as : ISO, NRG, MDF, IMG, BIN, DMG, BWI and more.
*. Even supports converting other image types to ISO (for that you’ll have to use the PowerISO library which should be installed when you click on the “convert image” from its menu).
*. Burn images to CD/DVD.
*. Manager large number of disc images easily (search, view history, delete etc).
*. Generate and Verify data (“Checksum”).
*. Extract image’s boot contents (in a bootable OS image for instance).
*. Create an image out of any folder.
*. Encrypt & Decrypt content.
*. Compress.
*. Split and Merge image files.
*. Although it’s a bit weird, but you can even download YouTube/MetaCafe videos, convert video files into several other formats (including DVD ripping, PSP supported formats etc) and extract the audio file inside of a video!.
*. Create virtual CD/DVD drivers that supports Audio CD, standard CD/DVD, Sony PlayStation games emulation and protected game CDs.
*. Create large number of virtual devices.
*. Lets you open the mounted image directly using the file manager.
As you can see, it’s more than just another image mounter. You can install AcetoneISO in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 by typing the below command in your Terminal window.
sudo apt-get install acetoneiso
My only complain is that, it doesn’t seems support Drag-n-drop which could be a handy feature to have. But other than that… it’s just about perfect, well for my needs at least. And if you want to add video converting feature then you’ll have to install Mencoder. In Ubuntu enter the below command for that.
sudo apt-get install mencoder
So if you usually deal with a lot of disc images related tasks (say that you’re a member of a local GNU/Linux group and burn the heck out of CDs for distributing 😀 ) and looking for an extremely powerful tool that’s easy to use, then AcetoneISO is certainly one of the best ones out there without a doubt!.
