General Discussion

Howdy all! I'm back in New York City after my holiday travels to visit friends and family. I hope everyone had a great holiday season and that your new year is off to a great start. I thought I'd drop a note in the forums and give everyone a status update on a few things.

First off, thanks for the well wishes for the holidays and for the 'feel better' sentiments. I wound up having bronchitis or something like it for about 4 of the last 6 weeks and nearly visiting the ER... at least partially due to overworking (like pulling the all-nighters leading up to the Suite release). Sadly, it resulted in me being unable to have Thanksgiving with my family for the first time in my life. But I did get better in time for Christmas and get to see my folks, sisters and nieces and nephews, which was great. ... before having a bit of a relapse the last week which slightly curtailed my New Year's plans

Hello everybody,

today I stumbled upon a site/software that I think can interest Portable App users who like games.

The software is Metaboli and, in short, is an "engine" that integrates in a browser (Internet Explorer supported and Firefox before 1.5) and allow to download an "image" of a videogame. The service cost 9 € or 19 € for month, depending on how recent the game you download is. In this period you can download and play any number of games on any number of machine (you cannot however play the same game on more than one machine at once). The game image is updated with all the latest patch. Saved games are separated from the game image, so you can take them with you.

Many people post their own created portable apps but I never fully trust them. I came across some that changed the settings of the version that was installed on the PC. Is there a way to check if the program is done correctly and fully portable?

I got a new Dell laptop (XP SP2) at work. When I plug in my Verbatim USB drive it doesn't mount correctly. It has an "!" in Device Manager and does not show in My Computer. If I disable/enable the drive in Device Manager it properly mounts and gives me the what do want to do popup with PAM as the default choice. Any ideas on what's causing this and how to fix? The drive worked fine in the old PC and works fine on my home PCs.

Portable apps are totally wonderful! The big drawback though, I'm finding, is the need to be very careful to close them all before disconnecting the drive.

Is there any way to have the launcher do this with a single command (since it's already got most of the necessary information)? Or are there already other plans to fix this problem?

If this is something that's already been discussed, maybe someone would be kind enough to let me have the link to it.

Thanks.

I can say that I was amazed when I tried it. I have Windows and Linux on my home computer and use Linux 90% of the time. I use the portable apps all the time at work which is obviously a Windows machine and when I come home I figured I had to use Windows to access it. So this evening I right clicked the Portable apps icon on my flash drive and selected Open with and typed "Wine" and to my surprise up came the Portable apps menu. I could not be more happy this is great that it works from Linux which is the system I prefer. I used mine with PCLinuxOS has anyone else tried this with other versions of Linux?

Can't get suite to work.
Don't know why

I did a search for this topic, but couldn't find what I was looking for. I would like to install the entire Portable Apps suite on a flash drive where I already have Thunderbird, Gaim, and OpenOffice.org. If I install the suite on top of what's already there, will I lose the files that are on my drive, specifically my emails from Thunderbird? I'm going to play around with it, but of course back up my data before I do the install. If worse comes to worse, I can always erase the drive and reload what I already had on there.

Thanks for your attention to this. If this has been posted bef

Found an excellent launcher called 8Start. It's very configurable, and supports categories, custom icons and wallpaper. It doesn't have a backup function like the portableapps launcher, but it can link to any file or folder, and uses either absolute or relative paths.
It takes a lot more configuring - you need to define at least one group and category, and the links have to be added one at a time, but they can be edited and moved around after they are created.
I've left my key apps in the PortableApps Launcher, and also a link to 8Start. I moved all the other apps into a separate folder, and linked them in 8Start.

I just downloaded the Portableapps tool a few days ago and I love it. It's a genius idea and easy to use. I even installed the Google tool bar into my portable Firefox without skipping a beat. It's a great app.

I have a question. Would it be possible to completely lock out the local OS, and force the system to only use the Portable apps? This would be great for security risk users and dangerously dumb users.
Just hand them a flash drive and no matter what computer they plug into they always access the same stuff and can't access anything else.

I'm sure you could do this by booting from the flash drive and using the MAC OS7 you have on the site, but that's a bit to technical and time consuming for the average dumb user.