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General Discussion

General discussions of portable apps and news.

Bug Squashing Weekend

John T. Haller's picture
Submitted by John T. Haller on September 13, 2006 - 9:50pm

I'm planning on doing some bug squashing this weekend in preparation for the upcoming Suite release and wanted to be sure I've got everything on the To-Do list that needs doing. Right now, the list consists of:

All app launchers:
- Review trailing slashes in initial directory setups (causes issues with Win9x on a couple apps like Firefox in certain directories)
- Review split apps directory structure to ensure settings directory is applied (this affects Gaim, GIMP and a couple others)
- Ensure new GetParameters function is used so all apps are compatible with Unicode command lines (like filenames/paths)

CommonFiles Directory Structure (GPG, Java, etc)

John T. Haller's picture
Submitted by John T. Haller on September 13, 2006 - 9:43pm

As a part of the directory standardization, I'm thinking about adding a CommonFiles directory. This would be handy for binaries that are shared among multiple applications. GTK+ would be an obvious example (used by Gaim and GIMP). Java would be another candidate for the future.

In adding on to the proposed directory structure, we'd get:

\ (Drive Root)
  - Documents
    - Music
    - Pictures
    - Videos
  - PortableApps
    - CommonFiles
      - GTK
    - FirefoxPortable (etc)
    - GaimPortable (etc
...

As an example, the Gaim launcher, if it didn't find GTK in the internal directory, would check the PortableApps\CommonFiles\GTK directory.

How many bought a U3 drive and uninstalled U3?

Submitted by ernstmik on September 13, 2006 - 9:57am

I bought a Sandisk flash drive and it had U3 on it. Whether it did or didn't, I didn't care because it happened to be on super sale at Office Depot. However, it started met thinking about U3 and other portable apps so I am just curious how many people here removed U3 from their flash drive if it was previously installed by the manufacturer?

INI file doesn't work as expected...

Submitted by jandezz on September 12, 2006 - 5:50am

I've been using your portable apps with satisfaction for some months now.
Your idea is great and works really fine, but there's a particular I can't work out, possibly a bug.

I always used (sucessfully) INI settings to change the directory structure because of my organization of data in the thumb drive. What happens now is: I can actually move portablewhatever.exe anywhere and store with it portablewhatever.ini, where i set the variables which indicate the right paths.

But while in the previous version all was working fine, writing relative paths, now it works "half and half". I mean it works for the apps path, but not for the profile path.

sage

Submitted by raym on September 11, 2006 - 9:48pm

i'm looking for a light rss program simular to sage which is not compatable with firefox beta2

False Positive: Trojan: Downloader.Zlob (Sep 11)

John T. Haller's picture
Submitted by John T. Haller on September 11, 2006 - 10:27am

The AVG Free Antivirus program's definitions went a bit wonky (technical term) today and it decided that every single portable app launcher contains a trojan. Rest assured that this is just yet *another* issue with a free antivirus program's virus definitions and there's nothing wrong with any of the portable apps. As for what to do to fix the issue, you should contact AVG and ask them to fix their mistake. Don't click 'Heal' as, to AVG, that means 'Delete the file'.

Update Sep 12 - AVG has already confirmed that this was an issue with their morning virus definitions update and has released a new definition set that fixes this problem. Also, from AVG: "If you need to restore deleted files from AVG Virus Vault you can do it this way: open AVG Virus Vault (Start -> Programs -> AVG Antivirus -> AVG Virus Vault). Locate the file that was removed, right click on it and choose "Restore File(s)" option."

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