Hi,
If we had a portable Wine we can also put it on our USB drives and we could use our portableapps with Linux distros which does not have Wine installed.
I know it is not exactly the same thing but TeamViewer has it's own official portable version which works with Wine on all Linux distros perfect: http://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/index.aspx ( Select --> "Linux" and than "executable files, no installation required" )
Would be great also if will create a portable Wine for MacOS.
Thank you!
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Yes, the teamviewer uses kind of wine to make the program running on linux, but it uses only the essential parts of the wine just needed and all is specifically adopted and set up for the actual version of teamviewer.
This means, if you want have wine included with every app, one would need to select the correct files from wine and include them in the paf so the app does really work over wide range of linux distros.
Probably not wanted by many users as this will increase the size of the package very much.
Well other thing would be, if the whole current version of the wine would be somehow placed on the usb stick and run when linux as host is detected.
Might be doable, but the version of wine and linux would have to match probably too. Not sure what complexity is this leading to.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
I understand that it is very difficult and Wine will need too much libaries (files...) to work with all portable apps.
So I'm asking out of topic: Can we make a portable Wine just for a specific application. As on TeamViewer example and your sentence:
"but it uses only the essential parts of the wine just needed and all is specifically adopted and set up for the actual version of teamviewer."
I understand that it is possible to make a portable Wine just for one application to run properly on all distros.
For example I need Winamp to work on Linux distros. How can I make it?
Thank you!
well this we have say with care, as I do not believe that teamviewer works on all distros, it works on all my versions of ubuntu thought and it wil certainly work on all the major desktop distros.
I think something like that would be possible sure, I mean teamviewer did it is probably possible for many apps.
What the exact dependencies are for each app, hard to say. I mean teamviewer people did write the whole windows software too, so they know what they need from the windows operating system so they can pack exactly what they need.
I am not sure how much work it needs and we have to see also that here existing apps are repacked rather then new apps compiled from scrap.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
I research on many forums and sites about this topic.
I found on PlayOnlinux site that says "wine packages" ( here: http://www.playonlinux.com/en/download.html ) which directly goes this page:
http://www.playonlinux.com/wine/binaries/
I download the latest version for Linux. I see that Wine works portable
So I just need to set a prefix with this command:
export WINEPREFIX="/usbmedia/portablewine/cdrive"
when I go on another machine. After I unmount the USB drive I can remove the prefix by typing on command line:
unset WINEPREFIX
And the "cdrive" directory will work my home/user-data folder.
Until now I solve the problem of "how to make portable Wine". Now I need to know what dependencies needs each portable app which I will use from this site:
First solution-idea:
I know that most of (maybe all - I dont know) dependecies of a portableapp is inside on subdirectories of portable app. Because portable apps (from this site) works on most of Windows versions (almost with every different updated system: SP1, SP2...). And portable apps's libaries are something like "static". So most of them should work with portable Wine. If they will not work, that would be %90 Wine's problem/bug.
---------------------
Second solution-idea:
(I will use as an example the Foxit Reader.) I will install Foxit Reader with PlayOnLinux (on local) Wine which is installed on Linux OS. After I will copy the user-data folder (c:drive) to my portable Wine subdirectory. So I will have most needed libaries for Foxit Reader (not portable) inside my portable Wine. I will run the portable Foxit Reader from this copy of portable Wine. That would be better from the first solution.
----------------------
What did you say about them? I need to get yours comments...
Thank you!
seems fine, well you have to make your linux to look for the wine in that place, that is all.
The idea that all dependencies are inside the potable folder is not quite correct. The whole rest of the windows system might be used, all sorts of system programs for displaying characters on screen and what ever is build into windows. That it works over wide range of versions is the fact that MS does take care that things are backwards compatible to some extend. They provide inside windows system all parts needed for that.
So the programs can just call up some generic tools like msvcrt.dll and can write something with it to display etc.
Items needed, but normally inside windows system, will then be provided separately, often in same folder as the program.
The devs of wine try very much to provide some kind of replacement system components, so reasonable majority of programs will get what it needs.
This why the wine gets rather big and is kind of static in itself. So if you manage to persuade any linux to look for wine on your portable stick before you start any of the windows apps, then you might have achieved your intention already.
Only thing I am not sure at present is how make it usable, I mean so far I was using windows apps only in installed wine and that gave all those nice 'run with wine' entries in the file managers etc.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
The logical extension to this topic is a request for someone with more skill and knowledge than I (not a large ask!) to develop a combination of coreplus linux (http://tinycorelinux.net/) and Wine. If that could be achieved, we'd have a secure, compact and portable OS, on which all our portable apps could be run!
After playing around with this kind of thing a few years ago, I decided it was easier just to make the Linux portable and run installed apps than to run portable apps on an installed Linux. There are Linux versions of most of the apps here, and a lot of distros can be easily run from a flash drive.
Understood, and a reasonable comment. But neverthless, there are a good number of open source and freeware windows apps that are not available for Linux, and it would be quite a coup to be able to run all of these on a secure, minimalist, open source and freeware OS instead of Windoze. You'd have to admit that something as small as Tinycore/Coreplus has a significant appeal!
Lets think about it little bit.
Many linux distros support wine and most portable apps do run on wine so there is no problem to run them on linux in general.
However what you suggest is not very interesting. Tinycore and similar distros are so small, because they want be so small and have only very basic functions. They do not have any reasonable display functionality to accommodate some normal looking GUI. This is done by purpose there.
Wine itself needs at least same quality of graphic environment under linux as the included generic windows components.
So first the Tinycore needs to be blown up to support proper graphical drivers and window manager and all the libs able to deal with standard graphical functions.
I doubt that the devs of the Tinycore will agree to blow up their product for no big reason. Their distro will increase many times in volume by that.
Next include the whole wine into that distro, well this again alone is in size multiple of the whole Tinycore distro.
By that time you are ending up with standard distro like Mint or Lubuntu or similar debian or ubuntu derivative.
So it seems to be just big task leading essentially to a product already existing in multiple versions and widely available.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
No offense, but I feel your response is too based around TinyCore (iirc, one of 3 "Core" distros), and there are other Linux flavours that might be better suited for the task that also small. Perhaps Puppy? Porteus? ArchBang? Also, I feel the natural evolution of removable media storage size begs the revisiting of this topic. 770MB for an operating system isn't that big a deal nowadays.
Either way, I am in line with making things as backwards-compatible as possible. If the files end up small enough to use, let the end-user worry about usage scenarios and practicality. Having Wine all packaged up and ready to use PortableApps.com anywhere sounds very exciting for me.
So why not go and try it: https://wiki.winehq.org/Portable_Wine
However, I do not believe this falls within the scope/remit of PortableApps, given its fundamental purpose, which is all about running Windows Apps 'portably', on installed Windows Operating Systems; and not about making Windows Apps run on other systems, whether portable or otherwise. The proper place to discuss this is on the Wine Forum, a general *nix Forum, or a specific *nix Distribution Forum. Also, there are numerous Guides on installing full Linux Distros to external, bootable drives, any of which provide a suitable base for installing Wine and therefore an entirely portable installation. It's really not that difficult, but you have to be aware of the potential pitfalls of changing the hardware under which an installer OS is expected to run: whether the 'donor' system is set up to boot from an external drive, possibly differing boot systems (EFI versus 'Legacy' Boot), differing driver requirements etc.
The one additional point I would make is that is not particularly sensible to run any OS consistently from a USB 'Stick' because the wear and tear caused by the OS's constant access/read/write activity is not what they are designed for and you should expect them to fail within a relatively short time period. Better to use a portable Hard Drive or (preferably) SSD with USB3 (or better) connection if you want decent performance; and they can often be found at a lower price than a similar capacity USB Stick of good quality.
And, of course, it's still also still possible to to create a 'Windows To Go' System if you don't want to learn a new OS.
I don't know if the focus of this project is solely on Windows operation... after all, there is dialogue on the front page about running on Wine, Crossover, etc. And I will be trying it. Wine is pretty fun. Ran some of my favourite Windows apps last night to check some audio files.
I actually just tried making a WTG stick with Rufus, and it warned me somewhere in the middle that it might freeze during boot due to Microsoft using NTFS for the UEFI section or something... and can confirm, it did not boot. Instead, I installed Ubuntu to a USB stick, and am now happily running BOINC from it. The read/writes are minimal, and have run OSes from USB sticks for years... I guess it depends what you do with them.