I am completely impressed with this amazing Software suite as it makes one feel completely independent from the hassles of being bogged down to a computer and thoroughly impressed with the hard work put in by the Community behind it, hats off to you guys. And more than that I wish to thank you guys not only for giving the world this great software suite but also responding to queries in the best manner possible, I have visited several Open Source Software forums and Portableapps and the Ubuntu forums are just two forums where your queries are answered in the best manner possible without being given a cold shoulder. My question regarding portableapps is whether it can be platform independent in future i.e. once it is installed on a USB Flash Drive(pen drive),can one use it on a Windows platform as well as a Mac Platform as well as a Linux platform whichever one comes across?, if that happens then one can use portableapps on any Computer regardless of whichever OS is installed on it. So can Firefox for Windows and Firefox for Linux be replaced by Firefox Portable on the USB Flash Drive or Abiword for Windows and Abiword for Linux be replaced by Abiword Portable? Is it possible?
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As long as you have win installed you can use most apps here without hassle
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"I don't fear Computers. I fear the lack of them" Isaac Asimov
My Personal Blog in the making at a new address thibeaz.com
your friendly neighbourhood moderator Zach Thibeau
Either a Windows machine or wine installed on Linux.
My bad I meant Wine
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"I don't fear Computers. I fear the lack of them" Isaac Asimov
My Personal Blog in the making at a new address thibeaz.com
your friendly neighbourhood moderator Zach Thibeau
Did I just hear someone say "portable"?
Seriously, it's not even worth trying. Just Boot A Linux Kernel (TM) from your flash drive. Then you can bring most anything you want with you to any machine that supports a USB boot.
The applications and utilities available here (including the PortableApps Menu) are currently developed for Windows (although many of them run fine in Wine, which is available for MacOS, Linux, BSD and more).
But IN THEORY it should be possible to create an entire ecosystem (entirely new app launcher, entirely new apps) designed from the ground up to be multiplatform. The easiest way to do it, I suppose, would be to do it all in Java -- leveraging the fact that a fair percentage of machines out there already have a Java VM installed. There are a bunch of limitations involved in working with Java, of course...
However, there are already a few well-known Java-based apps around. Azureus, FreeCol... I believe one of the OpenOffice.org ports to MacOS is actually Java-based. What's missing, AFAIK, is a practical Java-based application launcher to organize all of this in an USB drive. I don't think this is a matter to be pursued here, though -- it's big enough to be a project all of its own. But in the long run, could be an interesting approach.
Java is not really the solution, not enough platforms have java installed and so your software is not really portable. A JavaPoratble on same device for linux/windows/bsd/mac would be...
Another idea would be theoretically possible. Only use the linux versions of all programs such as firefox. Then make this portable. If you are under windows you just need to run a linux kernel on windows and all could work. Practically no one has actually done that.