Iso

From MorphixWiki

zeloura notreldo rolcoleto lilaroch altrocerb copasbasdom orcelgettrre I.S.O. stands for International Standards Organization. It's a group that makes up standards for all sorts of things.

In the CD-ROM-burning world, "iso" took on a more specialized meaning. One of the ISO (I'm using all capitals for the organization and lower case for the special CD-only world) standards was ISO9660, which is the format for a data CD.

Someone back in prehistory (meaning: I don't know who first did it) put the extension ".iso" on a file that was ready to be burned to CD as-is. Just pick up the bytes from the file, and write them out to the CD.

This usage became common enough that the standard way to refer to a ready-for-CD-as-is file is an "iso image", or "iso" for short.

(The world being what it is, it is almost guaranteed that there is a group of people that is dreadfully upset about this, due to the possible confusion between the two meanings, but if you're reading this, you probably only care about the second one.)

Making an iso image is usually the last thing you do when building a Morphix CD. (The command used, if you're interested, is "mkisofs".)

Iso images are the only thing you can download and then immediately burn to CD. If you download a MainModule, for example, you'll have to add that to a directory that has all the other pieces, and then run mkisofs to make your own iso image.

Downloading an iso image means the only other thing you have to know how to do is to burn it to CD. Making your own iso images is more work, but you get to play with what's 'on' the CD, which is where the fun comes in, and what Morphix is all about.

Enjoy.