Hi all I did a search and although I found lots of topics to do with Wine and a few sporadic posts about using PortableApps.com Platform/Apps with Mac OS X.
So I thought I'd start a thread incase anybody else was interested and also so any Q & A or info could be easily found and shared in one place.
Ok so first off I'm running Snow Leopard 10.6.3 and I use WineBottler 1.1.35 (intel only) ( This is the first time I've ever used Wine so I like it to be easy) this may not be the best way to run Wine on OS X and there are other ways just try google or Winehq for more info. I am currently testing out all the portableApps I have on my drive.
I can say that PortableApps.com 2 beta 4 has been working flawlessly for me {although my custom theme I made didn't but that is not an issue I've just gone back to the default one and it looks the same as on any Win OS I've used before}.
I'll try to get ALL my PortableApps tested and post here with what results I get.
I can also say that
Notepad++ Portable works [I'm pre writing this post on it now for testing]
AIMP2 portable works
EraserDrop dose not but I could be doing something wrong or not have something configured yet I don't Know {I get an Error Autoit error line 1 script used with non-Array variable}
7-Zip Portable all seems well
that's all I have right now hope someone else is interested in this.
Thanks for your time!!
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PortableApps on Mac OS X Through Wine
May 4, 2010 - 3:37am
#1
PortableApps on Mac OS X Through Wine
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sounds good if have windows and mac ???wine could be your option with mac OS // on one USB
Hi. I'm new to PortableApps but I just got my Carbide USB during the latest promotion. I haven't found any documentation on how to package up the Portable Apps start.exe (and, if necessary, the related apps) in Wine to run on Mac OS X. (Currently running Mavericks.) I've downloaded the latest Wine and Winebottler but haven't found any instructions of what to do. Can you point the way to any documentation or summarize the steps you've taken?
Thanks!
- John -
You don't package the portable platform. Winebottler or similar should be installed on the Mac locally allowing you to run the apps.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I was thinking that Mac OS X *.app files operate on similar principles to Windows app installers. Windows installers basically run scripts that extract the files from the installer and put them in their appropriate places on the Windows system. PortableApps.com installers do this (extracts binaries and all related dependencies to a location of our choosing). Installers for non-portable apps might do things like register DLL files and make changes to the registry and stuff like that. PortableApps.com installers make very few, if any, changes to the registry. Most Mac OS X *.app files work the same way, only they extract all the files and do whatever else right when you double click them with none of the wizards present in Windows installers. So basically I was thinking that all that would need to be done (by someone who can actually program and is familiar with Mac OS X *.app files) is to take the *.app files for the Mac OS X version of these apps (if a version is available for MacOS) and modify the *.app packages so that they can be run from anywhere and create whatever they need to create relative to where the *.app is being run from (a lot of *.app files operate this way already but there are a rare few that are required to be placed into the Applications folder). Or if a Mac OS X version of an open-source Windows app isn't available it could be compiled under MacOS and all the binaries and related dependencies can be packaged into a single *.app file. I imagine this is how most of the apps on OSXPortableApps (on SourceForge) were made. I like the selection on OSXPortableApps but the only problem is that, other than Portable Chromium for Mac OS which still gets regular updates, the apps on that site haven't been updated for ages.
"Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn"
- the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
yeah I've been using winebottler as well (and including wine.app in the app bundle)
so far, as I would expect, the portable apps needing administrator privileges to run (such as disk cleaners and other such software) likely won't run right (if at all) as wine would not be able to communicate with the host mac OS system properly enough to request it
other apps that haven't run properly so far as a bottled app are LibreOffice (Apache's OpenOffice Portable seems to run well though so far anyway) and PidginPortable (the bottler didn't handle all my protocol plugins properly and thus could only login to google chat)
some workarounds so far though would be to use an online office suite (both google and microsoft offer a free cloud-based office suite accessible through most browsers) although I will keep my bottled Apache OpenOffice Portable around in case I lose internet access sometimes and need to work on an office document during that time
for multi-protocol messaging, if you use chrome portable then you can install a chrome web app called All-in-one Messenger which serves as a platform for logging into the web-based chat services of many different protocols such as Discord, Facebook Messenger, Skype, etc.
other than that the apps from this site so fat that I've used in the past seem to run fairly well as bottled apps on Mac OS....although I have to re-create them as when I originally got my mac it was as a refurbished mac originally built in early 2011....but there's a patch available that allows for the creation of an installer to install the latest mac OS onto it (Mac OS X Mojave, current version 10.14.4)...anyhow the patch I was using before had installed Mojave 10.14.3...all was well until they released an update to 10.14.4.....the older patch version couldn;t handle it properly and so the update trashed the file system on my boot volume....yeah :/
but thankfully I had backups and booted into an older Mac OS I have on a memory card...downloaded the tool for the new version of the patcher....and did a clean install...and since I'm not stupid enough to put anything on my boot volume in the way of personal files...it didn't take long for me to get back up and running....had to reinstall some software though and have to recreate the bottled apps I'd had saved to the desktop.....but no major personal files were lost
been saving them there until I can buy another external SSD and format it as APFS...which apparently has smaller cluster sizes......my current exFAT formatted external SSD evidently has cluster sizes large enough that a 700 MB bottled app bundle's "on disk" size registers as 6 - 7 GB (probably because each of the bundle's files, the bundle itself being actually a specialized file folder, or the vast majority of them anyway) were locking up these large clusters with small amounts of data (as that's how file allocation happens....say you have a volume formatted with 4 KB cluster sizes and you have a 5 KB file...that extra KB has to go into the next 4 KB cluster...but the whole cluster gets allocated to that 1 KB worth of data...basically leaving 3 KB worth of space that can't be used)
"Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn"
- the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
I fixed the issue with some of my protocols not being loaded properly in Pidgin Portable. Pretty much all the protocols I'd been using had been added via 3rd Party plugins from Eion Robb's github and evidently at some point I managed to somehow delete the libjson-glib-1.0.dll file from \PidginPortable\App\Pidgin and that was causing the accounts in the account list using those protocol plugins to register as unknown *facepalm*...so after re-downloading that file and putting it into said directory they worked fine both on a real windows machine and through wine on my MacOS and Ubuntu laptops. Although since Google was rude and disabled support for its XMPP server I had to install EionRobb's purple-hangouts plugin and that was a bit of a chore. Wound up having to download the *.exe installer for th plugin and opening it as an archive in 7-Zip and copying the *.dll files and *.pem files located therein to the appropriate subdirectories in Pidgin Portable and having to sign in to Google for OAuth and locate the Oauth code is also a bit of a chore but once done you shouldn't have to do it again no matter which machine you run it on as it seems to store the OAuth cookie (once you input the code in the popup from Pidgin) on the removable drive Pidgin Portable is on.
"Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn"
- the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen