Following the instructions in the Gentoo manual, I clicked on mirrors to download what they SAID would be an ISO file, but turns out to be http://mirrors.kernel.org/gentoo/rel...091018.tar.bz2.

But my CD writer, brasero, does not recognize a bz2 file as an ISO file. What am I supposed to do? Rename it by hand with an ISO extension? Or is the link wrong, I should have found and downloaded a file ending in .iso?

The file is not iso. Decompress it with tar
tar xvfj file.tar.bz2
and google to find a program to make it iso and then burn it.

Probably you can skip making it iso, just burn.

I don't think so. If I select "Burn Image", Brasero complains, "Please select another image. It doesn't appear to be valid image or valid cue file".

Now since I am running under Fedora11 (I forgot to say this in my original post), and it has "genisoimage", is that the kind of program you had in mind when you suggest I Google for a program to make an ISO out of the individual files and directories I get when I extract the tar file? Should I call it with option "--iso-level 3" to make sure it works even though many of the filenames are not 8.3?

BTW: thanks for the quick response.

For skipping iso file I mean to add files as data disk and burn them.

I don't have brasero, but in K3b I can add files and burn them in image file. I mean that and be sure to add hidden files. This is only suggestion, it helps when I have similar problem. If you want try it.

--iso-level3 option is a must, otherwise it will cut the names in 8.3 format and probably not work.

PS: Did you check the .tar.bz2 file with md5sum? It appear some error when extract it.
"tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors"

1 members found this post helpful.

You can also try to convert it by piping output of bzcat to mkisofs

bzcat stage3-ppc-20091018.tar.bz2 | mkisofs -o image.iso -stream-media-size 333000

where 333000 is size of media in sectors

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM

It work by me:
kode@laptop:~/3downloads/1junk/stage$ bzcat stage3-ppc-20091018.tar.bz2 | mkisofs -o image.iso -stream-media-size 333000
Max brk space used 0
333000 extents written (650 MB)
kode@laptop:~/3downloads/1junk/stage$ ls -la
total 795315
drwxr-xr-x 2 kode users 296 Jan 31 12:02 ./
drwxr-xr-x 7 kode users 320 Jan 31 11:53 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 kode users 681984000 Jan 31 12:03 image.iso
-rw-r--r-- 1 kode users 128563609 Jan 31 11:11 stage3-ppc-20091018.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 kode users 3047512 Jan 31 11:53 stage3-ppc-20091018.tar.bz2.CONTENTS
-rw-r--r-- 1 kode users 328 Jan 31 11:53 stage3-ppc-20091018.tar.bz2.DIGESTS
-rw-r--r-- 1 kode users 1202 Jan 31 11:53 stage3-ppc-20091018.tar.bz2.DIGESTS.asc
kode@laptop:~/3downloads/1junk/stage$

1 members found this post helpful.

The reason I did not do that is that the instructions explicitly say to burn them it as an image, not a data file.

Also, it IS counterintuitive that it should be done as a data file. That would just but a big bz2 archive on the CD. That doesn't sound like an image to me. Does it sound like one to you?

As for the tar error, that was going to be my next question But since I have since found that this bz2 file is not going to solve my problem, I will drop this project.

But thanks a lot for your help. You did more than many others would have by downloading and unzipping the file yourself. I really do appreciate that.