[tex-live] TeX-Live CD as secondary TeX-Source

[Ruprecht von Waldenfels]

Hello Everybody, 

(:I`m running my TexLives on a Win98 machine)

I have been using TeX Live 5 c for some time, running it off the CD and supplementing 
it with newer versions on /texmf-var/...

Now I bought the new Tex Live 6b. 
It seems to have a major drawback as compared to 5c:
While with the older version, I installed Tex Live to run off the cd, which enabled me to 
simply invoke latex by the commandline as long as the CD was inserted, this does  
not seem to be possible  with Live 6b.

In 6b, I always have to wait for the autostart thing to open, then click "run TeX off CD-
Rom" and then wait appr. 30 seconds while TeX prepares to be ready for processing. 
Afterwards Winshell opens, which I am not accustomed to and do not want to use (I 
use UltraEdit), so I close it again. Trying to process an existing file fails; an error 
message appeared saying:
This is TeX, Version 3.14159 (Web2c 7.3.3.1)
latex.exe: fatal: Could not undump 31670 4-byte item(s).
I am not asking for help concerning this error; I prefer using the old TeX-live 5c method 
for running TeX off the CD, since it is much simpler and faster.

Why the option to \emph{install} TL to run off CD abolished? It was working beautifully, 
all I had to do in order to compile a source file is have the CD inserted and press my 
shortcut for calling <latex c:\xy\z.tex>. I was happy!
Is there a way for me to become happy with the new version too? How do I do this?


What I actually dream of is this:
I would like to have only files needed for processing on the hard-disk, just the basic 
stuff I always need. No docs, no nothing else, no packages I normally don`t use

The rest I would like to have accessible on the CD-ROM, where the system would look 
for a file if it canīt find it on hard-disk. So the stuff on CD-ROM would be on some kind 
of  secondary search-tree only accessed if the first tree on the hard-disk yielded no 
results.

Using some additional package would thus simply mean adding the corresponding 
usepackage{} command in my source file, as it is the case when running TeX off CD. 
On the other hand, source files would be processed quickly, as is the case with an 
installation on hard-disk.
Thirdly, the hard-disk installation would be very slim (I constantly run out of space on 
my harddisk.)


Is this possible?  (Without spending days understanding TeX internals?)

Thanks for your attention, 
	R.v.Waldenfels