I had seen a perl program called install-live-cd on some mandrake derived liveCD distros, (eg pclinuxOS, turkix)

I think this uses drakXX perl modules. (maybe the partition stuff)

Anyways, in these distributions, you boot up into your liveCD, check it out, and if you like it, you run this application to install them on your harddisk.

pros: Just one CD needed
cons: liveCD needs more memory that the actual HDD installed version. If you have to do bulk installations on many PC's, esp with old hardware, this can become very time consuming, even impossible if you have insufficient RAM.

I notice that Ubuntu comes with a separate liveCD, and a separate install CD.
pros: bulk installations are faster.
cons: need 2 separate CD's

I was wondering if it WOULD BE POSSIBLE TO MERGE the two.

a) Have a liveCD as per normal
b) the isolinux.cfg also has a label called "install", this passes a separate init to the kernel.
c) this init does a minimal (single user mode?) boot, starts a install program, which merely starts X server and launches the install-live-CD perlQt script.

Any reason WHY NOBODY seems to be doing this?

Also, I would appreciate any pointers on how to create an init process that just starts X server (without prompting for boot), and then launches this live-cd-install program.

Thanks in advance,
Vivek

The Adios livecd has hard drive install as a menu option, if you press m ( menu ) about 3 times.

It's kind of hard to beat the PCLinux for ease of hard drive install / Remaster and deploy to other machines.

For many distributions, the size of livecd+install packages may be too large for the one disk. Most 'installable' LiveCDs have a bare minimum of software. And, due to the compressed filesystems, the install takes significantly longer than it would otherwise.

You can install Knoppix to your hard drive if you want...

Thanks Guys.

I am aware of "Install to harddisk" options in various liveCD distros. That was not my question.

These "install to harddisk" in various liveCD distros are available AFTER you boot and Login into a Desktop environment.

At this point the system is fully running, and using up a lot of RAM. So this may not be possible to do on an old 128M RAM machine

Besides, (even if we were to use a lighter desktop environment such as xfce/fluxbox) it wastes time to do it this way.

Why cant we have an option in the liveCD's to do the install straightaway - from the first isolinux boot menu? This could boot the kernel with a separate init parameter, that takes the user straight to the "install program"

ADVANTAGES: With this option, the system need not start all the services, needs to just run a minimal graphical environment, user doesnt need to login etc,

Bulk installations on many machines would be faster.

We would be able to install liveCD's on old 128M machines.

Like I said, Adios does have that feature. You only need to type m to get basic vmlinuz and menu options. From there, you type: install
That will ask you what partition you want to install to. You may need to partition the drive first, in which case, look at other menu options.