Creating an ISO image from a zip file

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Quick link to the original posting, my thanks to Gary for sharing this useful tip for MAC OS X.

Some days ago i was working via SSH/VNC on my Mac OS X server where i needed to install Oracle 11G for linux 64-bit.

One of the great features of VMWare Fusion (present also in other VMWare products) is the possibility of attaching an ISO disk image as if it were a physical CD or DVD, avoiding the physical burning of CD or DVD media.
Unfortunately i hadn't such ISO image available, i had instead the source files in a zip file downloaded on the Mac.

I could have copied the files from the host to the guest operating system or executed from a shared folder, but i preferred to see if i could find a way of stuffing the content of a directory into an ISO image file using plain OS X commands.

Fortunately, Google came to the rescue and i stumbled upon Gary's blog, where i found such great tip, that i easily adapted for my case:

First of all unzip the archive:

unzip linux.x64_11gR1_database.zip

This will create a subdirectory called "database" into the current one.
Finally, create the ISO disk image:

hdiutil makehybrid -o oracle11g.iso -iso -joliet -hfs -udf database

Now you can mount the resulting ISO file through VMWare Fusion.
If for some reason you cannot run the installer, e.g. you get a "Permission denied" error, it can be that the "cdrom" is not mounted properly. By mounted properly i mean that a line like the following must be present in the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/cdrom   /mnt/cdrom  auto  exec,noauto,owner,ro 0 0

For some reason this line was present in a Xubuntu Linux VM i've created, but was not present in Oracle Linux and i don't really know if it is a "quirk" of the auto-mount feature or a normal behavior.