Portable Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird for Linux

I use several Linux computers and therefore require a portable Thunderbird but also portable Firefox for Linux. Thus I wrote two simple scripts to create a portable Thunderbird and a portable Firefox.

Please download the latest version from the following project page https://wiki.privacyfoundation.de/PortableLinuxApps

This is download-thunderbird-portable.sh

#!/bin/sh
# Configure the following variables according to your requirements

version="2.0.0.17" # usually most recent version
language="en-US" # e.g. "de" or "en-US"

########################################################

application="thunderbird" # "thunderbird" or "firefox" but file extension, archive extraction, and binary execution needs to be adapted as well
file="${application}-${version}.tar.gz"
url="http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/${application}/releases/latest/linux-i686/${language}/${file}"

mkdir "${application}-portable"
cd "${application}-portable"
wget $url
echo "Extracting archive, please wait..."
tar xfz $file
rm $file
mv $application app
mkdir data

echo '#!/bin/sh' > "${application}-portable"
echo 'dir=${0%/*}' >> "${application}-portable"
echo 'if [ "$dir" = "$0" ]; then' >> "${application}-portable"
echo '  dir="."' >> "${application}-portable"
echo 'fi' >> "${application}-portable"
echo 'cd "$dir/app"' >> "${application}-portable"
echo './thunderbird -profile ../data' >> "${application}-portable"

chmod +x "${application}-portable"

Here is download-firefox-portable.sh :

#!/bin/sh
# Configure the following variables according to your requirements

version="3.0.3" # usually most recent version
language="en-US" # e.g. "de" or "en-US"

########################################################

application="firefox" # "thunderbird" or "firefox" but file extension, archive extraction, and binary execution needs to be adapted as well
file="${application}-${version}.tar.bz2"
url="http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/${application}/releases/latest/linux-i686/${language}/${file}"

mkdir "${application}-portable"
cd "${application}-portable"
wget $url
echo "Extracting archive, please wait..."
tar xfj $file
rm $file
mv $application app
mkdir data

echo '#!/bin/sh' > "${application}-portable"
echo 'dir=${0%/*}' >> "${application}-portable"
echo 'if [ "$dir" = "$0" ]; then' >> "${application}-portable"
echo '  dir="."' >> "${application}-portable"
echo 'fi' >> "${application}-portable"
echo 'cd "$dir/app"' >> "${application}-portable"
echo './firefox -profile ../data' >> "${application}-portable"

chmod +x "${application}-portable"

Simply use a texteditor to save the appropriate script. Don't forget to set it executable either by a right mouse click on the file and selecting preferences or by executing "chmod +x download-thunderbird-portable.sh" resp. "chmod +x download-firefox-portable.sh" in a shell.

Furthermore I see a demand for portable Linux apps in general. Thus it would be great if PortableApps.com would also include portable Linux applications.

Please download the latest version from the following project page https://wiki.privacyfoundation.de/PortableLinuxApps