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View Full Version : F/OSS on a stick



zachtib
September 4th, 2006, 04:23 PM
As a university student, I have to use public terminals a lot, 99 times out of 100, that means using Windows XP, and as a result, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, etc.

Then I stumbled upon this site: http://portableapps.com/
which repackages open source apps so that they store their config files locally rather than on the C:\ drive. I quickly installed Firefox2, Gaim2, the GIMP, and OpenOffice2 on to my 1GB pen drive, along with a few smaller, yet handy utilities such as putty. Then I downloaded another app from the same page called PStart.

Now, the problem with protable apps is that you can't make shortcuts to them in the root directory of the removable drive, because Windows uses absolute paths, and the drive letter will change at every computer you use it at. This is where PStart comes in handy. My setup is to install all apps in the /Applications directory of my jumpdrive, so FF is under /Applications/Firefox/ etc. PStart creates a custom start menu based on relative paths, and then creates a custom autorun.inf so that PStart will run when the jumpdrive is inserted. It then drops a start menu into Windows's system tray, and all of your applications can easily be launched this way. Finally, I don't have to convert my documents to .doc files, as I can just carry OOo around with me.

If anyone here has to use public computers a lot, I'd recommend looking into this site, as it's been very helpful to me.

reacocard
September 4th, 2006, 05:28 PM
I used to use portableapps.com too, before my flash drive broke. Another good site is The Portable Freeware Collection (http://portablefreeware.com/), which has almost 800 free portable applications.

ounas
September 4th, 2006, 05:55 PM
I used to use portableapps.com too, before my flash drive broke. Another good site is The Portable Freeware Collection (http://portablefreeware.com/), which has almost 800 free portable applications.

Thanks for the link...

-Ounas
:D

jISh
September 4th, 2006, 06:17 PM
That is quite interesting!