While Bootable CD is extremely handy without any need to ever install it, sometimes, some people want their systems to run off of our operating environment from their hard disks. This would mean that you would, after installation, remove the CD from the drive and be able to use it for other purposes while still running our operating environment and without needing the CD to reboot.
As a point of reference, a typical install time is under 2 minutes. A slow install takes 5 minutes, and a fast install takes under 1 minute.
To install the Bootable CD, after CD bootup on a clean system with an empty hard disk, login as root and type:
WGin
To install the Bootable CD, after CD bootup on a previously used system, you will want to do a backup first as your disk will be overwritten. Then, login as root and type:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=1 bs=512 WGin
This will overwrite the partition table on your hard disk and then do a full install.
To remove the Bootable CD installation from your hard disk (/dev/hda1 is overwritten) but leave the data on the rest of the hard disk as it was, after CD bootup, login as root and type:
WGout
To upgrade from a previous Bootable CD distribution, boot from the upgraded CD-ROM, login as root, and type:
WGup
To remove the Bootable CD operating environment and ALL DATA from your hard drive - or to wipe out the contents of a hard drive connected to your system, after bootup, login as root and type: "diskwipe".
(1) Installing the Bootable CD checks to see if anything else is installed. If so, it stops there. This takes about a second. (2) If no other installation is present, it partitions and formats the hard drive for use. This takes about 5-10 seconds. The partitioning includes a 350 Meg root partition, a 32Meg swap space, and the rest of the disk which if formatted for user files. (3) Next it copies the contents of the CD onto the hard drive and decompresses a few of the files. This takes most of the time - from 30 seconds on a fast system to 3 minutes or so over a USB port. (4) It then rigs the hard drive to be bootable and exits the program.
The file system containing the Bootable CD distribution is overwritten using diskwipe. The rest of the system is left as it was. This typically means that you can do install, outstall, install, outstall, CD bootup, install, etc. and the data will always be available.
An upgrade is identical to an install except that the user file system is not altered and the current CD is used for the contents. This means that you can not only move to newer versions, but also to older versions if you like.