This would be the procedure:
Linux/Mac: dd the image to a USB
Windows: UI installer to USB - this restores one of two images:
- Core System - this will offer Linux for a USB
- Installer interface. This will run atv-bootloader, wget the images from Google Code, untar them and dd them to the internal drive and change the com.apple.boot.plist for the user. Will require a large USB though (4GB minimum)
I will offer a ./help feature through SSH which will offer some basic commands for the user like ./update_on and ./update_off for turning on/off auto updates.
Expanding to use the full disk should be possible for hard drives, but for the USB it's going to be impossible in Windows - I can make a simple copy + paste script for Linux though. For hard drives the disk structure can be as follows:
Code:
sdx1 - 34MB Recovery
sdx2 - 512MB Swap
sdx3 - Xgb ext3 root
The fact that the root of the drive is sdx3 allows it to take any size because if I am correct, it is possible to adjust the End Sector of the disk where the end sector would be drive size / 512 bytes, this sector count is static for 40gb and 160gb drives that are stock.
All of this will take time to put in to practice.
As for space, I wouldn't worry about it. I've just reduced a Ubuntu system and I'm down to a mere 390mb disk space in use, boot time is around 10 seconds.