What does ISO-9660, Rock-Ridge, etc mean?
These terms refer to the organization of the file system on the CD-ROM. ISO-9660 is the standard CD-ROM file system. It is designed to be interchangeable amongst various operating systems. ISO-9660 has the following restrictions: no directory trees of depth > 8; file name length < 30 characters; characters for the extension to be compatible with MS-DOS; no extensions for directory names; uppercase characters only; no "odd" characters allowed. High Sierra File system is another name for ISO-9660 because the ISO-9660 proposal originated in the High Sierra Hotel in Nevada. Rock-Ridge Interchange Protocol is an extension to ISO-9660 that uses System Use Sharing Protocol (SUSP) to further describe the files. This allows longer filenames, uid/gids, posix permissions and block and character devices. Essentially using the rock-ridge extensions will give you a file-system that behaves exactly like a Unix file system.
