Remember that simply mounting an iso does not emulate a CD drive. The kernel, which, by definition, is the sum total of all code running on your computer on ring 0 of the processor, which has the highest privileges on a typical day, has the privileges nessicary to look down the pins of the processor and see all hardware. All non-kernel programs cannot see hardware. That can, however, ask the kernel what it sees. Thus all your hardware spec programs (lshw, lsusb, lspci, Speccy, Sandra Lite, SpeedFan, CPU-z, GPU-z, WMIC, etc.) actually are merely telling you what the kernel told them. They didn't go find out about your hardware on their own. So to emulate hardware, one "simply" inserts a kernel module that makes the kernel lie when programs ask about hardware so that this extra illusionary hardware is reported. In Windows, to insert such a thing into the kerenel, one installs a kernel-mode driver. Whereas in Linux, one simply inserts a kernel module. Mac OS X is also a modular kernel and kernel modules for OS X are called kexts (short for kernel extensions). Wine does nothing in ring 0, so there's no way you can install a CD emulator into Wine. For Linux, there is a free program called CDEmu that emulates an optical drive via kernel module. Since Wine and programs therein ask the Linux kernel about hardware, they see the illusionary drive that the kernel module reports. If you were to simply mount an iso, you are merely making the files in that iso appear in a folder. It does not add anything to the hardware list. Cheers, Jake
