There are many software tools that make your life easier when it comes to every day tasks like burning CD / DVD. In this “how to” article, I’ll show you how to create and burn disk image using disk utility.
Creating a disk image
Burning onto a CD or a DVD is popular on a modern PC. The most popular burning software on the Mac is Roxio Toast. It’s a shareware software and it does not come included with the OS X.
To burn optical media in the OS X, you can drag and drop files and folders onto a blank media then hit burn when you are done to start the burning process. The most convenient way is to use the disk utility instead. Disk Utility can be found at /Applications/Utilities folder. Disk Utility enables you to create DMG and ISO images that you can burn onto an optical media.
To burn a DMG image in disk utility, simply create a folder with everything you want to burn, click on the “New Image” and select the files to burn. When you save the disk image, open it in the disk utility click on it and hit the burn button on top to start burning files. To create and burn an ISO image follow steps below:
- Open disk utility.
- Drag disk image into the left pane.
- Click on the “Images menu and choose “Convert”.
- Select “DVD / CD master” from the “Image format” pop-up menu.
Name your file with .cdr extension and click save.
When disk utility finishes converting the file to an ISO image, in Finder change the file extension from .cdr to .iso.
Now you can burn an ISO image on both Mac and a Windows PC.
Another way of creating an ISO image is by using Terminal:
cd ~/Desktop
hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o Testfile.iso Testfile.cdr
You can also burn ISO images on your Windows PC using burning software like Nero or similar.
Posted by Davor 
Back in 1998 I was very unhappy with using Windows and was thinking about an alternative. While reading a computer magazine I spotted a few articles about an exotic operating system – Linux. After reading the article and seeing screenshots, I decided to give Linux a go as a secondary OS on my system. I went down to the computer shop and got a copy of Slackware 3.0. At the time I was a complete newbie in Linux and knew nothing about how to install it. Back then Linux wasn’t as easy to install as it is nowadays so it took me a whole day to successfully complete installation. I sat down with heaps of manuals that came with the installation CD, magazines and lots of enthusiasm. At the time I didn’t have Internet at home so it was a bit tricky getting the information I needed. First, I went through the partitioning and installing the core system, configuration of stuff like X11 and external devices. Not to mention drivers and getting things to work under Linux at the time. It was a hassle, but it was also really challenging and fun. It was great to see how i was beating obstacles step by step and how much I learnt during the installation process. Those were the happy days of Linux if you ask me. You would have to put effort in installing and configuring stuff. Nowadays, Linux is made so simple that it loses that charm it had before. I know that Linux is now more user-friendly and one does not have to deal with drivers and configuration as much because everything is being automated. I think new Linux users today are able to learn much less about how the system work because everything is instantly there. The only thing one has to learn eventually, is how to compile the kernel. What do you think? Was Linux better back in the old days?
Posted by Davor 
