This section briefly lists a few of the many 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.
- kscd
A graphical CD player included as part of the KDE desktop environment.
- gtcd
A graphical CD player included as part of the GNOME desktop environment.
- Workman
a graphical player running under X11 and supporting
a CD database and many other features
- WorkBone
an interactive text-mode player
- xcdplayer
a simple X11 based player
- cdplayer
a very simple command line based player
- Xmcd
an X11/Motif based player
- xmitsumi
another X11 based player for Mitsumi drives
- xplaycd
another X11 based player, bundled with sound mixer
and VU meter programs
- cdtool
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.
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 at 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.
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/unixfreeware/archive/. They were
written by Bill Siegmund and Rich Morin.
Take our 
