I think the fact that you can just install a complete Linux distribution on the USB to begin with, including your desktop, effects settings, documents, and applications... quite easily and without any cost (since you don't need extra Linux licenses) has slowed development of portable apps for Linux. That's usually what people do.

You can quite easily squeeze Ubuntu, for instance and a moderately hefty set of applications onto a four gig USB drive and still have plenty of document space. If you use a *small* linux distribution like DSL or Puppy Linux (e.g. the Breeezy project), then even on a 1GB USB, you could store a number of applications and documents in addition to the OS.

If you're willing to make some sacrifices on boot time, you can do this using a Live / Persistent type of installation (see http://pendrivelinux.com for examples). The advantage is that it will boot successfully from almost any Intel-based computer. Alternatively you can just format the USB as ext2 or ext3 and install a Linux distribution on it just as if it were the internal drive, and it will be significantly faster, but customized to your Eee....

From what I've seen, there isn't currently a working repository of easily installable Linux portable binaries, today.

Is a bootable USB an option?

mkrishnan wrote:

I think the fact that you can just install a complete Linux distribution on the USB to begin with, including your desktop, effects settings, documents, and applications... quite easily and without any cost (since you don't need extra Linux licenses) has slowed development of portable apps for Linux.

.............................

From what I've seen, there isn't currently a working repository of easily installable Linux portable binaries, today.

Is a bootable USB an option?

PS I wasn't trying to rubbish your suggestion I use portable O/Ss all the time too - just putting in my "vote" for true portable apps

Thanks but it wasnt what I was after .
I am guessing the way GNU/Linux is setup it doesnt support
running un-istalled apps/games which is a shame , theres a huge
push on Windows for portable apps more and more lately .

Windows still does for me have some good advantages at times
(eg portable apps , certain FREE apps that isnt on Linux/Mac)

Currently using NLITED custom Windows 2003 on my file server
and gaming box and using the default Linux on the EEE .

Ive learn more about Linux after using the EEE but having
portable apps on linux would make using Linux a whole lot better in my view.

In Linux, there are some statically compiled binaries. They are just one big binary (exe file) for one program with all the required libraries already built into it. If you compile the program from source code yourself, you can always compile it as static binary.

Some softwares also have static binary available for download, e.g. xnview static. They are just not popular because there are too many different Linux distro with different libraries need to run in that distro. So, unless that program require just a few libraries (that does not change very often), then you can compile a static binary.

It would be good if we can establish a download source for such static binaries for the Eeepc.

would their be a way to re compile the source code of opensource apps from
going from install only to this static/portable run method ?

Using a gui program or script ?

Here is another link I ran into some months back.  I is currently inactive, but there may be something of interest to you:

http://pafl.portools.com/

I would like to point out that for an application to be truly portable in all senses of the word it needs to be platform independent. This actually requires the application be written in something like java.

This creates the problem that you now need Java installed. Oh but wait you can get Java to be portable, now the only thing you need is to have a different version of Java for each OS you plan to use. Depending on how many applications you would use this might take up less space than having the application installed to your flash drive 5 different times.

The big problem. most things are not written in Java and those that are are badly written and buggy or run incredibly slow. In a perfect world, Java would not take 200M pe install, and more apps would be coded in it.

All this in mind a good OS bootable flash drive really is the best answer, even though not all machines will let you boot off the drive, it's probably going to get you farther than installing the apps on your flash drive several times.

You can contribute this to the lack of hardware standards, big corporations not wanting to play nice with each other nor with the open source community, and Intel's horrid idea of just stacking new features into the x86 instead of just making a new processor that works better and saying tuff to the big OS corps.

But if you have a netbook, you can just about carry it in your pocket and not need to worry about all this.

I've just been trying IceWeasel on my eeepc 701 running Debian-eee. You're right, it doesn't work the way it was described on the site, aka simply unzip it and run the script!

To have it running, I had to go to the following file (after having given me all the necessary permissions on its files and sub-files!):
IceWeaselPortable-3.0.4 / App / usr / lib / iceweasel / iceweasel

it's this 8.4 KB shell script that you have to click on and run. And funnily, it is not labelled as iceweasel.sh. It's the file that is in the 6 files after the xulrunner folder.

On the PortableApps for Linux site's forum, it seems that some fixes will be done for the next release   http://portools.com/forums/

Last edited by oupsemma (2009-01-07 7:34:40 am)

Hi,

I would like to point out that for an application to be truly portable in all senses of the word it needs to be platform independent. This actually requires the application be written in something like java.

This creates the problem that you now need Java installed. Oh but wait you can get Java to be portable, now the only thing you need is to have a different version of Java for each OS you plan to use. Depending on how many applications you would use this might take up less space than having the application installed to your flash drive 5 different times.

The big problem. most things are not written in Java and those that are are badly written and buggy or run incredibly slow. In a perfect world, Java would not take 200M pe install, and more apps would be coded in it.

As I've written in another thread, my freeware personal finance application Jabp can run entirely from a USB drive.  It is written in Java 1.1, and so runs on just about any Java-enabled device (even with old versions of Java) including Windows, Mac OS, all Linux distros, Windows Mobile and some high-end smartphones.

Best regards,
Malcolm
www.freepoc.org

x86 Linux portability? just don't strip your binaries after you build them...

:-)

linux_author wrote:

x86 Linux portability? just don't strip your binaries after you build them...

:-)

Sorry, but that's wrong ! 'strip' removes debugging information and symbols. It does not remove compiled in libs. What you have to do to make a portable app is a bit more complicated. You have to link the program completely static (meaning no dynamic loading -> really big executable files) and you have to make sure that it does not reference any resources (i.e. pictures for icons, configuration files etc.) by absolute path because paths to files will be different across distributions or even from one installation to another(different mount points).

Holger

MakeSelf might be a help in creating portable apps. It creates a script that contains a tar archive appended to some script code that extracts the archive and runs an application from that archive. It can delete the extracted files after the application has closed.

I don't know any portable apps that have been created with it, though.