DVD Authoring

Q-DVDAuthor is a GUI frontend for dvdauthor and other related tools.
The goal is to provide an easy-to-use, yet powerful and complete interface to generate DVD menus, slideshows, and videos to burn on a DVD.

Installation on Ubuntu

You can install it from the Application menu. But I recommend to install it from the command line, so some optional tools used will be installed as well.

sudo apt-get install qdvdauthor transcode toolame dvdrtools

Visit also

Check out the applications web page for some menu templates and user guides.

Mount .ISO image as CD/DVD drive

On Ubuntu or any other Linux

There's a console way or a GUI way.

Mount by hand

sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 my.iso /mymountpoint

GUI way

The best tool is AcetoneISO, supporting almost all kind of disc images. Read more about this tool in this separate post.

Add Gmount-iso from the application menu or install it by issuing

sudo apt-get install gmountiso

.

Just select the .iso image you want to mount, select a folder where it should be available and that's it.
Unfortunately, it seems to support only .iso images.

If you need to create .iso files, look at this post.

Integration into Nautilus

Some people have created scripts that can be launched directly from Nautilus on the .iso file. You can also look here for instructions with screenshots.

On Windows

Several applications exists, all supporting several other image formats apart from .iso

Virtual CDRom Control

From Microsoft there is a very small tool (~ 60kb) which can mount .iso and some other formats.
Read the Readme.txt about it's install and usage instructions.

Daemon Tools

DAEMON Tools is an advanced application for Microsoft Windows which provides THE best optical media emulation in the industry.
It supports the biggest amount of protection modes and image formats.
But it's uninstallation was quite bad some time ago, not sure if it is better nowadays.

Alcohol 120%

Alcohol 120% can also create several virtual drives and permits to mount images directly from the right mouse menu.
But it's main purpose is burning images to CD/DVD, supporting several protection modes either.
I recommend this tool, but it's not freeware.

File Synchronization

Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.


Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration management packages (CVS, PRCS, Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.), distributed filesystems (Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities (rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers (Intellisync, Reconcile, etc).

Other applications

Linux

rsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer.
In Ubuntu you can install from the application menu Grsync, a simple graphical interface for rsync.

Windows

SyncToy is a free PowerToy designed by Microsoft that provides an easy to use graphical user interface that can automate synchronizing files and folders. It is written using Microsoft's .NET framework.

GUI for the alternativates system

Galternatives is a GUI to help the system administrator to choose what program should provide a given service.

It updates the /etc/alternatives links, which defines default applications for the traditional Unix/Linux system, for example which java virtual machine should be used in case there are several versions installed on the system, which webbrowser will be launched etc.



Basically, it is a graphical front-end to the update-alternatives command-line tool.

Install on Ubuntu

sudo aptitude install galternatives

Finally, we could create a launcher in our main menu (System-->Preferences-->Main Menu):