Mounting .dmg files in Ubuntu

Every now and then, it may be useful to mount a Mac OS X .dmg (disk image) file in Linux. I just had to do this to get some Canon printer drivers (PPD files) which were distributed in a .dmg file.

There are two steps (not including installing the applicable packages which make reading Apple's HFS+ disk format possible):

1. convert the .dmg file into a .img file
2. mount the resulting .img disk image

Before that, install the hfsplus package which allows accessing HFS+ volumes. This will probably install libhfsp0 as a co-requisite. You will also need the dmg2img package to convert the compressed .dmg image format to an uncompressed .img format.

Once you have the appropriate packages installed, do the following (assume the .dmg file is mydisk.dmg):

    $ dmg2img mydisk.dmg

    $ sudo modprobe hfsplus

    $ sudo mkdir /mnt/mydisk

    $ sudo mount -t hfsplus -o loop mydisk.img /mnt/mydisk

    $ cd /mnt/mydisk