[dkulchenko]

I am planning to start off a Portable Apps for Linux idea (based off of the portableapps.com idea), where you can get software that you can put on a USB drive and use it on any computer, with the settings for that program following you.

I have the necessary technical knowledge to do this, and am willing to undertake this, but:

1. I'm not sure if people need this. With the relatively low amount of Linux machines out there, will people need to carry their programs around to the limited amount of Linux boxes out there?

2. Due to the high amount of work to do this, I'd like to know roughly if people will use this, or if this isn't an idea to get many people into.

So I'm asking you: Do you think this idea would be successful?

I want to know if I should do this...

[i92guboj]

Originally Posted by dkulchenko

I am planning to start off a Portable Apps for Linux idea (based off of the portableapps.com idea), where you can get software that you can put on a USB drive and use it on any computer, with the settings for that program following you.

As I understand it, this PortableApps thingie makes a copy of your programs, along with it's data, into an usb pen drive, along with some kind of autoplay feature or something, which would display some menu or something? (just a guess, I haven't tried it).

1. I'm not sure if people need this. With the relatively low amount of Linux machines out there, will people need to carry their programs around to the limited amount of Linux boxes out there?

I usually carry my custom installation of Gentoo in a pen drive if I need. Or a livecd, though there's no home data there.

2. Due to the high amount of work to do this, I'd like to know roughly if people will use this, or if this isn't an idea to get many people into.

I suppose it could be useful for some thing. But there are some thing that I don't know how could you achieve, partly because I don't have a deep understanding on how PortableApps works.

For example, let's use as a example firefox. This is supposed to copy the firefox binaries to a pen drive, along with all the related stuff in $HOME/.mozilla/.

First, you need to determine the drive and mount it, that's trivial enough, even if there's no consistency on how different distros do that.

The first serious problem is that all the programs would need to be compiled statically. Why? Because there's no way -that simply plugging in the device- the lib search paths are going to change to point to your pen drive. So, you need static binaries. And you'll need to compile them yourself.

If you are going to walk that way, you might be interested in klik:

Linux.com :: One-click installation with Klik
klik - Linux Software Download

Another interesting question is how is this going to be in sync with the contents of your home directory (if at all). I don't suppose that the regular linux user is going to allow any autoplay feature to mess with the files on his/her home (and besides that, there's no easy way to achieve that, since there's no autoplay in linux, at most you can fake it using dbus/hal on gnome, kde and xfce).

I like better the idea of klik for porting or testing software, but that's just my opinion, and I don't use it either.