This section briefly lists some of the key applications related to CD-ROM that are available under Linux. Check the Linux Software Map for the latest versions and archive sites.
Several programs are available for playing audio CDs, either through a headphone jack or an attached sound card.
a graphical player running under X11 and supporting a CD database and many other features
an interactive text-mode player
a simple X11 based player
a very simple command line based player
an X11/Motif based player
another X11 based player for Mitsumi drives
another X11 based player, bundled with sound mixer and VU meter programs
command line tools for playing audio CDs
Some of these programs are coded to use a specific device file for the
CD-ROM (e.g. /dev/cdrom). You may be able to pass the correct
device name as a parameter, or you can create a symbolic link in the
/dev directory. If sending the CD output to a sound card, you
may wish to use a mixer program to set volume settings or select the
CD-ROM input for recording.
The Inheriting File System (IFS) is a kernel driver that allows mounting multiple file systems at the same point. It is similar to the Translucent File System provided under SunOS. By mounting a hard disk directory over a CD-ROM file system, you can effectively obtain a writable CD-ROM file system.
The current version is experimental and was written for the 0.99pl11 and pl12 kernels; it may or may not work with more recent revisions. The author is Werner Almesberger ( almesber@bernina.ethz.ch).
A similar package, called the user file system, is another possible method of providing similar functionality.
PhotoCDs use an ISO-9660 file system containing image files in a proprietary format. Not all CD-ROM drives support reading PhotoCDs.
The hpcdtoppm program by Hadmut Danisch converts PhotoCD
files to the portable pixmap format. It can be obtained from
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/hpcdtoppm or as part of the PBM
(portable bit map) utilities, available on many archive sites (look
for "pbm" or "netpbm").
The photocd program by Gerd Knorr
kraxel@cs.tu-berlin.de can
convert PhotoCD images into Targa or Windows and OS/2 bitmap files.
The same author has written the program xpcd, an X11-based
program for handling PhotoCD images. You can select the images with a
mouse, preview the image in a small window, and load the image with
any of the five possible resolutions. You can also mark a part of the
Image and load only the selected part. Look for these packages at
ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/linux/Local/misc/.
The ImageMagick image file manipulation program also supports PhotoCD files. It is available from ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/applications/ImageMagick/.
Eric Youngdale's mkisofs package allows creating an ISO-9660
file system on a hard disk partition. This can then be used to assist
in creating and testing CD-ROM file systems before mastering discs.
The tools for actually writing data to writable CD-ROM drives tend to be vendor specific. They also require writing the data with no interruptions, so a multitasking operating system like Linux is not particularly well suited.
These are some utilities for verifying the format of ISO-9660 formatted discs; you may find them useful for testing suspect CDs. The package can be found at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/cdrom/ptf/. They were written by Bill Siegmund and Rich Morin.