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Portable Apps for Linux

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stomph
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klik

hi there, just stumbled on this thread as I too would like to have truly portable linux apps.

There is another project called 'klik' (http://klik.atekon.de/) that packs linux-software into a one-file-package, without the need to install the application itself.

According to their faq, klik-packages can also be run from USB-stick. The only downside is probably, that it needs a klik-client on the host-machine...

Don't know if that project is still alive, though. Just thought this might be of interest to people more knowledgeable around here..

thevictor
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It would be even more awesome if...

This is a great idea, but I wonder if you could take it a step further: would it be possible to have binaries for Linux and Windows in the same folder, so they both access the same settings? This would be great for people who regularly use both Linux and Windows machines.

solanus
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Is this effort even

Is this effort even progressing?
I haven't heard hide nor hair from it.

I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.

agdurrette
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that be cool!!!!

i don't know but that is what i want to.

"It's just an online installer. It's not going to mug you.", JTH
"The shell is the key to unlock Linux's greatest advantages."

Mickeyj4j
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I would really love to see This

that i could install one set of apps and one PASuite that can run in, windows, mac and linux (with just extra scripting added to the PASuite to make it compatible). but if there needs to be a separate PASuites for each it would be OK (i have a 20 gig portable hard drive). then i would not have to worry about witch OS i was using.

so if anyone can create this it be the greatest thing in the world. it would save allot of time and space. maybe it is a big ask and starting with separate app versions may have to be the way to go for now.

i am no programmer have no experience with it at all so i cant help in any way. but i understand that these are all different OS's so it may be impossible to do.

if only wine could run all windows apps then we would be in heaven. mac can run both its own and windows apps so that usually not a prob but wine needs to come along way to catch up to mac.

but i like tha idea you have here and as you can see i like Pendrive linux as it can run within windows.

this has been my thoughts for you all. I hope i have not gone on to much. My aim in this post has been to encourage you to keep going forward with this idea and something like this may eventuate in the future.

An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

MickeyJ4J

Darkbee
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Not possible to my knowledge

You cannot create compiled apps (i.e. an executable) that run natively (outside of some emulator) on Linux, Windows and Mac, as far as I know. Closest you can get is writing apps in Java or some other (multi-platform) interpreted language. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

A nice idea though, would make life a lot easier. Smile

dkulchenko
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It is

solanus, the effort is progressing. Google for "Portable Apps for Linux".

solanus
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Thanks

I'd seen your post
https://portableapps.com/node/16896
which pretty much initially said that you'd given up as of Nov 25th.

I'm glad you didn't give up, and found a way to progress.

I like the idea of being able to boot to a Live CD, and still have your favorite apps and docs running from a USB. (Knoppix is my fave, but it's lagging behind in the latest versions of key apps like OOo)

Keep up the good work!

I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.

ishan
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Little help on the way
dkulchenko
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We do

We (PAFL) definitely make use of that method. There's also many other ways of making portable Linux software, and if put together into a whole, can create a portable product. For example, ~/.* directory backup/copy, dependency symlink building, changing configuration files, creating wrapper scripts, and so on.

Mickeyj4j
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Try this also

An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

MickeyJ4J

Mickeyj4j
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Ubuntu 8.04.1

as this is the Vista of the Linux world it should be included as one of the first linux distros for a PA linux launcher.

An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

MickeyJ4J

dkulchenko
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No

You don't get it. A PAFL Linux launcher would not launch Linux distributions, it would launch portable Linux programs, much like the PA Platform does for Windows.

Mickeyj4j
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duh

I did know that. What I ment is ubuntu should be one of the first systems you work on, also some others like susie. " refer link"

http://linux.about.com/od/popular_distros/Popular_Linux_Distributions.htm

Here is the popularity chart

Popular Linux Distributions
Debian (3) Red Hat (3) Gentoo (3) Slackware (3) Kubuntu (165) SuSE (3) Lindows (3) Ubuntu (396) Lycoris (3) Xandros (3) Mandriva (3) Xubuntu (85)

An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

MickeyJ4J

dkulchenko
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I mean

I mean that I am trying to make the apps so that they work on all Linux distributions, not specific ones. As in, there won't be a separate package for each distribution, but rather just one that works on all.

Mickeyj4j
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Well

That sounds good hopefully you can do it.

An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

MickeyJ4J

Mickeyj4j
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XP, Vista & Mac

Would that include XP, Vista & Mac. I know they are not linux distros but it would be handy to have each app be cross platforming. if this can be done it would help out everyone who may from tiime to time use a different opp sys

An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

MickeyJ4J

gluxon
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Mickeyj4j...

I know this is an old post made by you, but...

I just read it and...

Ubuntu IS NOT the Vista of Linux!!! ubuntu is ubuntu, vista is vista.

Parliament
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Portable Apps on Linux

I've found a way to get Portable Apps to work through Wine & Crossover. Am also working with Klik. Tried Rox Desktop, but didn't get far. Anybody out there trying anything else?

gudmund
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Isn't Portableapps on Wine/Crossover Office old news?

Or did you manage to make e. g. Thunderbird work in a stable manner?

I've had most of the Portableapps I was using at the time work straight off in Crossover. Didn't try all of them.

Problem was that they worked until they crashed. Sometimes they didn't crash, sometimes they did.

Did you do anything special, like using the Wine tricks thing with autodownloading .dll's from the Internet?

Gudmund

Mickeyj4j
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Here goes Wine = :(

After much testing and trying to figure out things. I have found that Wine can only run older simpler windows aps as the Portable apps are getting complex its not working.

The main issue i have is getting the pa menu to work as it does in windows. it has weird rendering and not much. the same.

I use Linux Mint7 an offshoot of ubunut9 atm. if this can be loked into it would be great. even you could creat your own vmware for PA like Google has done with Picassa3. maby this would be a better idea. ?????

What do you say.

An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

MickeyJ4J

Mickeyj4j
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Linux Mint user

I can test it in Linux Mint for you.

Linux mint is a cut down version of Ubuntu. with the ability to auto detect and run anything installed or plugged into the computer.

BTW what is the latest on your project.

An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

MickeyJ4J

kiwijohn
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Portable Apps for Linux in EeePC V1.6.1.64

How do I use portable apps with my EeePC which shows the OS as EeePC 1.6.1.64 ?

gudmund
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Unfamiliar with EeePC, but

you should be able to use whatever standard method it uses and install either Wine or Crossover Office on it. After that, windows executables should default to being run using one of those.

Possibly, the Portableapps menu will not autostart on plugin. If so, just browse to it and start/run it.

Gudmund

jm8094
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Linux Portable App

You may want to look at the open-source app, "KeepNote" http://rasm.ods.org/keepnote/ for portable note-taking.

jack

asuka.forever
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Portable Lin-Apps installer formats

I wonder what installer format the portable Lin-Apps will use, as there are quite a few installer formats (.deb, .rpm, .sh, .jar) in linux. different

asuka.forever
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difficult to make them cross-distro

harder to get make portable pps cross-distro in linux

isaacg
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RE:

Well it would need to be a format that ALL distributions could use. How about just using a .tar.gz then you could just extract it to your flash drive.

gudmund
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If it's portable, why need an installer for Linux?

Subject says it.

Gudmund

isaacg
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How about this?
solanus
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liveusb-creator is for operating systems

The intent of Portable Apps for Linux is to create individual applications that can be ported from one Linux system to another.
liveusb-creator doesn't do that, it creates a whole portable OS on your stick.
There are a number of other similar live-usb setups out there, including for Puppy linux, Ubuntu, and Knoppix.

While I think these are good, they require that you boot the computer from the USB stick. There are still a lot of computers out there that cannot boot from USB, and public-use computers may have their boot-sequence set to only boot from hard drive.

My experience with public Linux computers was at internet cafes in France. I'd never tried to reboot their system into one of my own live distros, but considering the amount of lockdown they had on their own Linux setup, I'm not sure they would appreciate me using my own OS, or that I would be able to access the internet.

I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.

tlchost
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Puppy Linux

As far as I recall, one can boot Puppy Linux from a CD or DVD, a USB drive, the hard drive...and with a little bit of work, a floppy.

I carry a Live-CD and a bootable USB drive with me....have yet to use a boot floppy.

Another consderation is which Portable Apps do NOT run under which version of Wine in each Linux Distro.

Thom

ledm78
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Hello world

I'm using a diferent type of firefox portable on UNIX PLATFORMS,
and, TOTALLY FREE

Is how to install on windows, an common app, but on removable disk
I: J: K:.

On Unix is equal to make file on command terminal, changing the root directory of install to: media/disk/(folder)

This will generate the libraries on removable disk where runs on ONLY EVERY UNIX Platforms

KILLING this RUNZ tha don't serves to nothing ARGH!!!

Stevoisiak
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I just use a portable linux

I'd probably just use a Ubuntu install on a USB Hard Drive. Also, I've never actually seen a PC, (Other than my own) that uses Linux.

Simplifying daily life through technology

Zach.Z
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Question

What level of donation(s) would you and your team need to take your technology to "I can use my 8gb SSD (flash media) as a small HD, the host O/S (MAC/LINUX/WIN) as my "DOS/UNIX" to peripheral controller, and the portableapps.com launcher as my 'Universal Program Interface'" while still keeping it OPEN SOURCE?

Of course it would need to leave no trace.

Are you an NPO? Would you become one?

It is for a perfect world I strive. For even though I may fail, I will still progress. May my heart and mind leave careful footprints.

digitxp
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About...

My estimation...about $10k, depending on how soon you want it :P.

Insert original signature here with Greasemonkey Script.

solanus
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Hardy enough...

I believe that your plan would require...
(Places pinky to corner of mouth and pauses for dramatic effect)
ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.

digitxp
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Um...

You do realize that you yourself will get 0% of the donation... Wink

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Chris Morgan
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Explain?

Could you please explain more what you're asking? It's not very clear to me what you mean.

Also Rare Ideas, LLC is not an NPO: it's an LLC (limited liability company) and has no intention of becoming an NPO but rather of making it more a commercial venture - details of partnerships etc. coming soon. Have no fear that it will become other than open source though. We care about that, and it's a lot of what the community is built on (if John wanted just money he's already had at least half a dozen opportunities of becoming a millionaire through selling out or commercialising all aspects of PortableApps.com; fortunately, he cares :-)).

I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.

“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1

stefanx
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Thunderbird and Firefox Portable for Linux

Here is a portable Firefox and Thunderbird for Linux: https://www.privacyfoundation.de/wiki/PortableLinuxApps

abushcrafter
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Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

megabyte
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Horray for linux! This is why:

In a world without walls and fences, why use Gates and Windows?

Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO (or Linux) is the answer.

In most countries selling harmful things like drugs is punishable. Then howcome people can sell Microsoft software and go unpunished?

Once upon a time there was a DOS user who saw Unix, and saw that it was good. After typing cp on his DOS machine at home, he downloaded GNU's unix tools ported to DOS and installed them. He rm'd, cp'd, and mv'd happily for many days, and upon finding elvis, he vi'd and was happy. After a long day at work (on a Unix box) he came home, started editing a file, and couldn't figure out why he couldn't suspend vi (w/ ctrl-z) to do a compile.

Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux

Intel engineering seem to have misheard Intel marketing strategy. The phrase was "Divide and conquer" not "Divide and cock up"

"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk ?"

Microsoft spel chekar vor sail, worgs grate !!

linux: because a PC is a terrible thing to waste

Going from XP to Linux is like trading a glider for an F117.

"If the future navigation system [for interactive networked services on the NII] looks like something from Microsoft, it will never work."

"Besides, I think Slackware sounds better than 'Microsoft,' don't you?"

"Linux poses a real challenge for those with a taste for late-night hacking (and/or conversations with God)."

"...Unix, MS-DOS, and Windows NT (also known as the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly)."

"...[Linux's] capacity to talk via any medium except smoke signals."

"Linux: the operating system with a CLUE... Command Line User Environment".
many more at: http://www.linuxweb.com/lw_quotes.html

Signature??? scratch... scratch... scratch...

EspaÑaks (not verified)
Yep

But Window$ learned to give the user things done (well or badly done, but done) before than the *NIX or GNU/LINUX developers, so it became popular.

And there's nothing we can do about it save having a really cool linux desktop and, when some guest asks "Whats that so coooool app in your windows desktop?", be able to answer "It's not windows, it's something much better supported (community), more customizable and usually faster than windows called LINUX. And best of all, it costs 400$ less than Win7 Ultimate!!!! (+ time and headaches saved when installing, productivity, "enjoyness", etc)

Darkbee
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:D

Very amusing! Bravo. Smile

I'm still not a big fan of the elitist *nix command-line snobbery but there are definitely some advantages of Linux over Windows.

OliverK
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Both have their advantages.

Both have their advantages. I am a good windows user and a competent linux user, when I need it.

The problem is the lack of "out of the box" support like windows more or less has, as well as the needed custom, hand done configurations.

For users with time and the need, linux is good. Otherwise, windows will continue to rule

Too many lonely hearts in the real world
Too many bridges you can burn
Too many tables you can't turn
Don't wanna live my life in the real world

cjay554
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Portable Linux Apps

Someones waaay ahead of ya Smile

http://portablelinuxapps.org/
also at sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/portable/

Very awesome structure. Basically the apps are put in its own "iso" like structure, its all compressed to one file, and its mounted and ran whenever it is executed. All information is inside the app, no external files, all of it is inside the folder. You should help them out as they have one hell of a structure going, and im sure the more brains available the better Smile

You can also find them at chat.freenode.net in the #elementary channel.
cheers!

EspaÑaks (not verified)
Ive been reading about those

Ive been reading about those in some blogs recently. Arent they applying the apple dmg idea?

David Dixon II
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Looked nice.

But why do I get this then?

[dbdii407@myhost Desktop]$ ./Pidgin
pidgin: error while loading shared libraries: libXss.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
pidgin: error while loading shared libraries: libgtkspell.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
pidgin: error while loading shared libraries: libpurple.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

(Which sums up to about 80.97MB on Arch Linux.)

Second, I thought that portable applications were not supposed to save, in this case, the user's home directory. Which in this case, it is. I have .opera .xchat2 saving to it.

Na na na, come on!

calfheathcam
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You could make it fully cross-platform.....

I use Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on all of my computers, but I only know a few others that run Linux... my other friends use Windows. I think it would be quite useful if the installer installed both versions (Linux and Windows) of the launcher and applications. And then, data could be kept in sync between both versions of the applications (ie. I set a new filter in Thunderbird) so on the Windows version I could access changes I'd made in the Linux version. I don't know if thats possible... and perhaps they could "Share" data, using the same files (other than executables, of course) to run. So then, I wouldn't end up with 2 "installations" of Thunderbird on my USB stick... just 2 different executables.......

CapnChkn
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"Portable" Apps.

I can tell you having Thunderbird running on a thumbdrive is the best! Since 2005, I've had no problems until I started running Ubuntu on a netbook.

Portable Thunderbird has run under Wine for 2 years without much trouble; I have to shut down everything before I close or it messes up the files for later. I also would not be able to run anything until the next rebuild of the OS. Lately, the progams close unexpectedly. I upgraded to the latest version, with no luck.

I run Open Office Portable on Windows machines, then open and run the files from the Linux versions without problem. Thunderbird has settings, folders, and such that I find don't translate the same way.

I suppose a "Portable" application isn't actually portable unless it runs on multiple platforms.

Tim Clark
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Really?

I suppose a "Portable" application isn't actually portable unless it runs on multiple platforms.

Well, they're portable in that they can move from machine to machine and maintain your settings and not leave personal data behind.

And most run on 89% of the machines you will find right out of the box.

Add to that Linux users with WINE and Apple users with WINE or Parallels or Boot Camp and it's gonna work on just about all the machines your gonna have.

Some of our users use our software exclusively under WINE and don't seem to have a problem with it.

Tim

Things have got to get better, they can't get worse, or can they?

Darkbee
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Different Uses of the Term Portability

I think you're confusing possible uses of "portability". The primary function of apps here is to be able to use them on any supported Windows computer, such that those applications are not tied to the registry of a specific computer. In addition, whichever computer the "portable application" is run on, it is designed in such as way as to minimize the traces left behind to leave the host machine in as close to the same condition as before the portable app was run.

The fact that you can use portable applications from here on things like Wine (via Linux) is a side-benefit not a goal of the project.

The other use of portability would refer to things like Java, which enable the same Java code to be run on multiple computing architectures and operating systems, as long as those systems have a Java interpreter (virtual machine) available to them. PortableApps.com is not a virtual machine.

Mickeyj4j
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My Thoughts

I am not to sure where this project of creating a linux installer is.

I am all for a linux based installer. here are some thoughts i have.

1. you would need to make an installer for each linux operating system.
although linux is basically a kernel with a bash command prompt (terminal) each os needs
apps tailored to them. just like mac apps don't work natively in windows. there are allot
of portable linux based apps already available but mostly they are ubuntu based versions
that dont run on other os.

2. you could make a general source application that can be installed in any linux os.
This would be good if the apps where also managed in the a pa-linux platform independent of
the os then once installed it would run.

3. The current windows installer seems to work in most versions in wine and works,
sometimes they run better than native apps.

4. it would be great if you had one set of applications on the flashdrive and then the installe to run the apps on whichever platform. windows, linux or mac.

what benefits is there in having a native Linux installer. the portable apps are still in windows format. you would need to make Linux based apps and again might need specific app installers for each different linux os. i would try to first see if there are any optimizations you can make so that the current installer runs in wine better.

An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

MickeyJ4J

farat_as
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Portable Wine Or New Portable Linux Apps Project ?

If we can make a "portable Wine" for Linux we can also use PortableApps Platform on other Linux distros directly. Here I found a discussion about portable wine:
http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=13560&sid=1f46da6968509bdcf5501b...
The important point from the link is that TeamViewer has a portable version for all Linux distros (which works perfect) based on a Wine which is portable. (You can try it by installing it from TeamViewer official site.)

----

Also here there are many apps for Liux distros: http://portablelinuxapps.org/
But I did not like the apps here. Because they does not save the user specific configuration files inside portable directory. They use /home/user_name folder. That's why the user specific settings (configurations, extensions) are not portable. And if we run an portable app which is installed also on Linux, it runs with old-user specific configurations, and it can change them too Sad That is very bad.

ottosykora
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idea is nice sure, but

the way people like teamviewer do it, they just take the absolute essential parts of the wine system files collection and bundle that with their program in a way that it directly calls up the included wine components.
This needs to be done for every single program again and again as different programs will need different part of the wine collection of system files.

If not done this way, the programs will become very big in volume, not very useful then.

As people want more and more windows programs to run via wine, it is becoming bigger and bigger.

Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland

Mickeyj4j
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ok there are quite a few

ok there are quite a few portable Linux apps here. http://portablelinuxapps.org/

they work in a wide variety of linux distros

An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

MickeyJ4J

nightbeholder
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5 year old thread... so many

5 year old thread... so many good ideas...
Why didn't anyone here tried to put them into practice? Sad

As for the apps in portablelinuxapps.org, the idea and concept is there but as someone else mentioned already, they don't save the settings into the folder/file, they save it to /home, so really not portable at all...

There are a few other projects but they all seem to be dead unfortunately

The addition of Linux versions of portable apps in this site would be wonderful and I'm sure there would be lots of people happy about it. At least (for a start) some few primal apps like firefox for example.

I just hope the reason why it hasn't been done yet isn't just "because it's not worth the trouble"... Just because windows is the most used OS (we all know why...) doesn't mean other OSs should be neglected/forgotten...

And yeah, there's wine, but it's not the same thing, the guis look bad and out of place in a linux ambient and the menus end up borky and bugish...

Browncoat
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Yep.....5 years..but......

I bounce between Windows and Linux, thus learned to find the /home
directory and migrate the profile folders back and fourth.

Mandriva had a great product called the Mandriva Flash that grew from a 4 gig to a 8 gig stick in 2010 but since then no other development. It had T-bird and Firefox from here to run in windows
from a special partition that then shared data with Mandriva One
when booted. I own one. Though every 18 months or so the Linux side would self destruct, requiring the rescue mini-CD but I blame it on their choice of USB stick brand as the windows side stayed intact.

@megabyte - July 11, 2010 - 12:14pm

Back then I was annoyed with the DOS command line crap and went with the Atari ST which improved both my speed and productivity.
Only 2 years after the end did I succumb to the lure of Windows 98.

The ST/TT were great but general ignorance in North America made them go by unnoticed by the great unwashed masses. Whereas elsewhere,like Europe they were used not just by hobbyists, but in business, tech and point-of-sale terminals.

For a little history:
http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/_vti_bin/shtml.exe/index.html

geekbling65
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Portable Apps

Hello all!
As I read on down through the comments on this post it started to appear, to me anyway that the topic was beginning to stray away from the OP's comment and everyone jumped on Johns comment about browsers. The OP stated that he was starting the process of creating a 'portable apps' project aimed at Linux as opposed to Windoze. As far as I can tell, to date Portable Apps has been creating wonderful, fantastic software! Software that I have used on my own Windoze box. And now, because I have always been primarily a Linux user, I've ventured over to this site in search of the same software (or similar to..) for Linux. Which consequently brought me to this post.

Now I noticed that it's been a little over four years since the OP has shown up on the radar and as far as I can tell, if he/she has in fact kicked off
this 'Portable Apps' for Linux project, for some reason he/she has chosen to keep it a secret for what ever reason. Or, what happens more often than not is he/she has involved his/herself in another project and at this point is in pretty deep and juggling a couple, if not several projects, so we wait! Sad I should say, if he/she is anything like me!

Insert Disclaimer Here --->  Now with that stated, I just got here! And jumped right to this post so there could very possibly be a Linux distribution of 'Portable Apps' making Linux users everywhere happy and I'm just a geek left in the dust!
If this is the case, I apologize for my 'compositional diarrhea' and please excuse me while I go crawl under a rock!

Bradford
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The problem is the flavors of the linux kernel

with all the distros out there there is a greater effort to make things really portable. However most linux apps can be packaged with their dependencies and be - mostly portable. There are other projects out there to create portable packages for linux applications. I came up with this one for ubuntu with a little searching.
https://itsfoss.com/orb-linux-apps/
The claim to have packaged a large number of common applications in this portable package with all dependencies include in the package. Not clear to me that it will have the nice launcher interface we have become used to with portable apps platform but it might be worth creating a launcher surrounding these ORB packages

If you can describe it, there is a 75% chance that someone else has done 75% of it. Search first then ask, then, iff necessary, build

josamen
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Yes I've seen the Orbital

Yes I've seen the Orbital Apps format. You can run *.orb files on linux distros without installing the ORB Launcher but I think even if you mark it as executable they still won't run unless you copy the file location and paste it into a terminal prompt and run it from there. There is another portable app format for Linux called AppImage where the program is contained in a *.AppImage file. As far as I can tell AppImage seems to be similar in concept to MacOS X *.app files. Basically AppImage involves putting the binaries and all their associated files for the program in question into an AppDir and then bundling the AppDir into an *.AppImage file. But after that the end user only needs to mark it as executable under the file properties then double-click it to run it. So I'm thinking the "Portable Apps for Linux" project should revolve around compiling the source code for all these open source apps into binaries (plus associated files) under a Linux OS and from there putting them into *.AppImage files. Heck it can be a project that the team for this site can undertake (either as a sub page on this site or by making a companion website).

Otherwise it would seem that for the moment our only hope is to install Wine on our Linux (and MacOS) systems and hope and pray the app in question will run (there are some that won't run, like the kind that require admin level access as Wine can't translate the Windows system call for admin privileges into Linux system calls for root access). I know there's a program for MacOS called WineBottler that, when used in conjunction with Wine on MacOS, allows for the creation of MacOS app bundles where you can bundle the folder containing the portable app (for example PidginPortable for the portable edition of Pidgin) and all its associated files and subfolders along with Wine.app into a convenient MacOS app bundle that a MacOS end user wouldn't even need to install wine to use (as Wine.app is included in the bundle with the portable app). The downside is that the resulting app bundle file/folder (*.app which actually reads as a folder if you view it in a Windows file manager) for even the smallest portable apps can be hundreds of megabytes in size (with the resulting bundles for larger apps like Apache OpenOffice Portable going into the gigabyte range) but again that's offset by the fact that the MacOS end user wouldn't have to install wine to use these portable app bundles. I'm thinking that in the absence of the development team lacking the time and/or resources to re-compile the code for all the portable apps they support into native binaries to package as AppImages for Linux or app bundles for MacOS that someone could make a similar program of WineBottler for Linux that does the same thing as the one for Mac but bundles them into an AppImage instead of a MacOS app bundle. As I said though, Wine can be very finicky and some apps may not run properly, if at all, in Wine so while it would be time-consuming, re-compiling the code for each of the apps on this site into native binaries for Linux and MacOS and packaging them as Linux AppImages or MacOS app bundles and making download links to these versions of the app in addition to the download links to the windows version would be the better way to go.

"Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn"

- the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

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