So you’re running Linux on your computer, maybe Ubuntu, and you have some files with the .dmg extension. In this guide, we’re going to talk about how to open, mount, extract, and otherwise get your files from these pesky DMG images. You could always just extract the files on a Mac, then transfer them back to your Linux machine. But if you really want to do this on Linux, without having to rely on Mac, here’s how to do it.
What are DMG image files?
Simply put, it’s a kind of image file. But not an image like a jpeg is an image. DMG is Apple’s proprietary disk image format, native to Mac OS X. There are actually a whole bunch of different types, format and options within this format. There are options for encryption, compression, and different kinds of partition schemes, among others. Unfortunately, this can make things pretty confusing when we’re trying to gain access to the data contained in one of these images.
DMG images are typically a kind of Universal Disk Image Format (UDIF), although there are others, namely NDIF and SPARSE. Although the .dmg file extension is usually used, they can also sometimes have an .img extension, or in some cases no extension at all. Their MIME type is application/x-apple-diskimage.
The HFS/HFS+ (Mac OS Extended/Journaled) file system is typically used in DMGs. However, this isn’t always the case. You may also sometimes find FAT and ExFAT files systems, as well as variations on HFS.
- Aug 13, 2018 The DMG one can go since you don’t need it anymore. First, eject the DMG by right-clicking it and selecting the “Eject” command, or by pressing the eject button next to the disk in finder. This unmounts the DMG file from your system. Next, delete the DMG file itself unless you have a reason for keeping it around. Can I Use DMG Files in.
- May 16, 2018 So you’re running Linux on your computer, maybe Ubuntu, and you have some files with the.dmg extension. In this guide, we’re going to talk about how to open, mount, extract, and otherwise get your files from these pesky DMG images.
- Aug 29, 2019 Once inside the darling shell, you can run commands as if you were on a macOS system. All program installation happens within the darling shell. Running the commands without connecting to Darling won’t work. To attempt to run a macOS program, first download the appropriate files. You’ll want to obtain a.dmg or.pkg on your Linux machine.
- Dec 17, 2011 A helpful command line tool called hdiutil is included in Mac OS X that allows disk image files (.dmg extension) to be mounted directly from the Terminal, without the need of using the GUI. Using hdiutil for such a task is helpful for scripting or remote connections through SSH.
- Download DMG Automounter for Linux for free. DMG Automounter is a nautilus script that enables any distribution of Linux to mount a Mac OS X.dmg file (but not install it, since that would require the Mac OS X APIs which are closed source).
Aug 25, 2018 Ways of Opening a DMG File in Windows: DMG Extractor (Free and Paid): The best and the most professional tool for opening a DMG file in Windows is DMG Extractor.It can open a variety of Disk Image Files and it also demolishes the need to convert the DMG file to ISO for use in Windows. Ubuntu is a common variant of Linux, complete with a user-friendly interface and full flexibility in customizing it via the Terminal window. Windows and Linux share the ability to open ISO files, which are similar to DMG files.
Does my system support DMG?
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to overcome when trying to work with DMG files is working with the HFS file system (Mac OS Extended). Linux supports HFS through the “hfs” and “hfsplus” kernel modules.
There’s an easy way to test if your system has these kernel modules. Plug in a USB drive formatted with the Mac OS Extended file system. If your particular distribution doesn’t have the appropriate modules, you will likely get an error message. On Ubuntu, you’ll get a popup window declaring “Ubuntu: Unable to mount
Alternatively, we can see if the kernel module files are present with find:
We want to see two files: “hfs.ko” and “hfsplus.ko”. If find doesn’t return these files, your system probably doesn’t support HFS.
You could also try “modinfo”: modinfo hfs
and modinfo hfsplus
should return something like:
If you get 'modinfo: ERROR: Module hfsplus not found
' your system doesn’t have these modules.
Not all Linux kernels and distributions support HFS. This is especially the case for certain distributions that are a few years old. If you have kernel support for HFS, great! If not, don’t worry. There are still ways to extract data from your DMG files. While it’s nice to have the option to mount the images we’re working with, this is really the only functionality we’re losing without having the hfs and hfsplus modules. The two programs we’re going to use later on (P7ZIP and dmg2img) do not require kernel support to function.
What kinds of DMG images can be opened in Linux?
This guide is about how to open, mount, and extract files from read/write, read only, and compressed DMG image files. The following partition schemes have all been tested with the techniques discussed here.
- Apple Partition Map
- CD/DVD (partitioned)
- CD/DVD (partitioned) with ISO data
- Hard disk
- Master Boot Record Partition Map
- No partition map
This guide does not cover how to handle sparse disk images (.sparseimage), sparse bundle disk images (.sparsebundle), or CD/DVD masters. DMG images with partition scheme types of “CD/DVD” and “GUID Partition Map” do not appear to work with the techniques described here.
Option 1: Mount the DMG
If the Linux distribution you’re on has HFS support in the kernel (Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS supports it), it’s pretty easy to just mount the DMG image:
We’re using “sudo” because we need root privileges to mount things. The HFS+ file system type is specified with “-t hfsplus”. The “/mnt” at the end of the command specifies where we’re mounting the image.
Unmount the image with sudo umount /mnt
If you get a wrong fs type message like the one below, it means the DMG file is either of an unsupported type, or it’s compressed. Unsupported images include sparse images, sparse disk bundles, CD/DVD masters, and images with partition schemes of the CD/DVD or GUID Partition Map types.
Use “file” to learn a little more about the image file:
If you get image.dmg: x86boot sector
that means it’s probably using a GUID Partition Map and isn’t supported. This isn’t good, however, it’s also not too terribly common.
What’s more common is to see something like this:
If mounting isn’t working, and this is what you’re seeing with “file image.dmg”, then you’re luck!. Our problems are being caused by compression. Linux doesn’t like to mount compressed DMG images. To get around this little obstacle, we’ll use dmg2img (see below).
Option 2: Use dmg2img for compressed images
So you have a DMG image that you can’t mount because it’s compressed. You’ve done “file compressed_image.dmg” and you got “compressed_image.dmg: bzip2 compressed data”. The fix? That’s easy: use dmg2img to convert it to an uncompressed image. Once you run the image through dmg2img you should be able to mount it no problem.
Don’t have dmg2img? It’s usually pretty easy to get using your distribution’s package management. On Ubuntu, you’d do:
Using dmg2img isn’t very difficult. Type “dmg2img” into the command line followed by the name of the DMG file you want to decompress. The Mac OS X version of Firefox is a good example of a compressed DMG file.
Now mount the resulting .img file:
Option 3: Extract DMG contents with P7ZIP
P7ZIP is awesome. It’s the Linux/BSD version of 7-Zip. Check out their SourceForge page here With it you can literally extract files from any kind of image or archive. Just kidding… It doesn’t really work with every format conceivable. However, it can handle (in alphabetical order): ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z. Impressed? I certainly am!
Installing p7zip is pretty easy using your distribution’s package management system. On Ubuntu with apt-get:
In addition to being able to extract data from compressed and uncompressed images alike, P7ZIP doesn’t require the HFS kernel modules at all. In the example below, we’re going to extract all of the files from “Firefox 33.1.1.dmg”. When we’re done, we’ll have a tidy little folder called “Firefox”.
Invoke P7ZIP to extract archives and images with “7z x”.
Notice that 7z extracted three files: “0.ddm”, “1.Apple_partition_map”, and “2.hfs”. To actually get to the files, we’ll need to run 7z again on “2.hfs”.
We picked “2.hfs” because it was the biggest of the three, meaning it was probably the one with the data. Simple but effective logic. After a few moments, you should have a folder called “Firefox” with all of the files from the original DMG.
DMG is a file of Apple Disk Image. The Apple Disk Images are disk image files commonly used by the Mac OS X operating system. When opened, an Apple disk image is 'mounted' as a volume within the Finder. Several Apple proprietary disk image formats can be used to create these images, including the Universal Disk Image Format (UDIF) and the New Disk Image Format (NDIF). Apple disk images usually have the .dmg file extension.
Apple disk images allow secure password protection as well as file compression and hence serves both security and file distribution functions; they are most commonly used to distribute software over the Internet.
Universal Disk Image Format (UDIF) is the native disk image format for Mac OS X. Disk images in this format typically have a .dmg extension. New Disk Image Format (NDIF) was the previous default disk image format in Mac OS 9, and disk images with this format generally have a .img (not to be confused with raw .img disk image files) or .smi file extension. Files with the .smi extension are actually applications that mount an embedded disk image, thus a 'Self Mounting Image', and are intended only for Mac OS 9 and earlier. A previous version of the format, intended only for floppy disk images, is usually referred to as 'Disk Copy 4.2' format, after the version of the Disk Copy utility that was used to handle these images. A similar format that supported compression of floppy disk images is called DART. Apple disk image files are published with a MIME type of application/x-apple-diskimage.
Different file systems can be contained inside these disk images, and there is also support for creating hybrid optical media images that contain multiple file systems. Some of the file systems supported include Hierarchical File System (HFS), HFS Plus, File Allocation Table (FAT), ISO9660 and Universal Disk Format (UDF).
Open/Extract DMG File on Windows
Easy 7-Zip opens/extracts DMG file easily on Windows. The Easy 7-Zip was developed based on 7-Zip. 7-Zip is a famous open source file archiver. The Easy 7-Zip is an easy-to-use version of 7-Zip. The open source freeware keeps all features of 7-Zip and adds a few useful features that makes the software more user-friendly.
Easy 7-Zip works on Windows 10/8.1/8/7/Vista/2008/2003/XP/2000 (both 32-bit and 64-bit compatible).
- Free Download Easy 7-Zip
- Install Easy 7-Zip by step-by-step instructions
- The installation will associate DMG with Easy 7-Zip automatically
- Double-click on DMG file to open DMG file with Easy 7-Zip
- Alternatively, Right-click on DMG file on Windows Explorer
- Done
You will see files or folders within the DMG file then, click button Extract to extract the DMG file.
And then, choose Extract files..., Extract Here, or Extract to 'folder' to extract the DMG file.
Easy 7-Zip Download Links:
You can install and use other alternative freeware that opens/extracts DMG file without burning the DMG file to disc. For example:
- Free DMG Extractor
- HFSExplorer
- PeaZip
Open/Extract DMG File on Mac
B1 Free Archiver opens/extracts DMG file on Mac. B1 Free Archiver is a free software for creating archive folder and extracting archive file. B1 Archiver works on all platforms - Windows, Linux, Mac and Android. The freeware supports most popular formats including DMG.
B1 Free Archiver is compatible with:
- Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks
- Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
- Mac OS X 10.7 Lion
- Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Alternative freeware that opens/extracts DMG file on Mac.
- Apple Disk Utility
- Keka
- GUI Tar
Open/Extract DMG File on Linux
You can use command mount to mount DMG file as a virtual drive.
First, you must login as a root user, and then create a directory for DMG image
# mkdir -p /mnt/macimage |
Use mount command as follows to mount DMG file called image.dmg:
# mount -o loop -t hfsplus image.dmg /mnt/macimage |
If the DMG is HFS file system, use:
# mount -o loop -t hfs image.dmg /mnt/macimage |
Change directory to list files stored inside an DMG image:
# cd /mnt/macimage # ls -l |
Unmount the DMG image, type:
# umount /mnt/macimage |
Convert Dmg Files
Alternatively, you can use p7zip to extract the DMG file. p7zip is the Unix command-line port of 7-Zip, a file archiver that archives with high compression ratios.
How To Run Dmg Files In Linux Download
Install p7zip-full on CentOS and Fedora
# yum install p7zip-full |
Install p7zip-full on Debian and Ubuntu
$ sudo apt-get install p7zip-full |
Run Dmg File On Mac
List directories and files in DMG file
$ 7z l image.dmg |
Extract DMG file on Linux
Run Dmg Files On Windows
$ 7z x image.dmg |