You are here

Portable apps from read only media like CDs?

6 posts / 0 new
Last post
Anonymous (not verified)
Portable apps from read only media like CDs?

Which of these portable apps work on a read only media like CD-R or CD-RW? FireFox and probably OpenOffice are out, but do apps like Gaim and FileZilla work from a burnt CD, maybe saving temp files to RAM and then when the app is closed the files are deleted from RAM?

Ryan McCue
Ryan McCue's picture
Offline
Last seen: 14 years 6 months ago
Joined: 2006-01-06 21:27
Portable Firefox Live

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."

nm35
Offline
Last seen: 17 years 6 months ago
Developer
Joined: 2005-12-12 17:13
It would be easy enough to

It would be easy enough to kill the profile after you close the app, so yes that would work. I don't think it would be worth it though, since you'd have to set it up again each time (except for FileZilla).

~nm35
» PortaSoft -- Portable Application Development
» Personal Space -- Under Construction

albator
Offline
Last seen: 15 years 12 months ago
Joined: 2005-12-09 13:47
Filezill

Filezill work.

________________________________________
345 portable applications:
http://standalone.atspace.org/index.html

nm35
Offline
Last seen: 17 years 6 months ago
Developer
Joined: 2005-12-12 17:13
Yes, but it either saves

Yes, but it either saves settings in the registry or attempts to save them in the INI file -- which is on the CD.

~nm35
» PortaSoft -- Portable Application Development
» Personal Space -- Under Construction

Abecedarian
Offline
Last seen: 17 years 1 week ago
Joined: 2005-12-14 11:28
Two Ideas

If you want settings saved

How hard would it be to just store your settings on a floppy or some such? Just tweak the .ini file to have the settings on A:\ and everything should work fine, correct?

Fresh Settings Every Time

This isn't truly portable, but it is a solution a friend of mine made for using Firefox on public computers a few years ago. He appropriately called it FriedFox.

Apparently there is a folder that users can always write to, the Application Data folder if I recall correctly. My friend basically edited the Firefox installer to install to this folder on any public computer. It took forty seconds to get Firefox running on any of our school's computer.

Besides, most public computers have an image stored on a server and wipe everything after being rebooted, making this pretty "ethical". And if they don't, you're doing the next user a favor by providing an alternative.

You could create an installer for any open source program so this'll work or, perhaps more easily, just download/copy a portable version of the program into this folder and launch it from there.

Topic locked