Linux for Travelers - Portable Apps

Portable Apps

LFT — Mon, 29 May 2006 17:16:40 -0400

A couple of people have written and asked me to mention Portable Apps. PortableApps.com is the most well-known source for portable software, but there are many more programs that will run on a USB thumb drive. Many programs will even run from a thumb drive with little or no modification, for example, Skype on linux (and possibly on Windows too).

PortableApps.com

Portable Apps as offered by PortableApps.com are Windows programs that you can put on a USB thumb drive (or on any kind of storage device) that will run without needing to install them on the computer. The advantages to this are:

Running Damn Small Linux in Ubuntu

LFT — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 21:23:04 -0500

I recently followed some instructions for putting Damn Small Linux on a thumb drive and was suprised to find that the latest version easily boots inside of Windows and Linux as well as directly from the thumb drive.

Here are some screenshots of Damn Small Linux running inside of Ubuntu Linux. Notice the window borders:

Portable Apps for Mac OS X

LFT — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 23:38:55 -0400

Many people have expressed interest about portable apps for Linux. There are also a good selection of portable apps available for Mac OS X. You can probably find others in this excellent list from Wikipedia.

Portable apps will not really provide security against an infected public computer. They may actually reduce your security on public computers for the following reasons:

Running Portable Apps on Linux

LFT — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 22:00:12 -0400

Many people have heard of Portable Apps and are probably wondering if they will run on Linux. Portable Apps (as distributed by PortableApps.com) are not made to run on Linux, but I have been able to get them to work on Linux under WINE.

To get them to work you need to have WINE installed, a program that lets you run many Windows programs under Linux. I have a page on how to install WINE on Ubuntu Linux.

Here is a screenshot of a couple of the Windows versions of Portable Apps running on Ubuntu Linux from a USB thumb drive:

Portable Webservers

LFT — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 11:39:11 -0400

If you make web sites, you may be interested in the new portable web servers that are available. You can run Apache, PHP, MySQL and other tools from a USB thumb drive.

PortableApps has a package of software called XAMPP which includes Apache, PHP 5, MySQL, and other tools. This tool is especially useful for testing PHP scripts locally on your machine.

There is another portable webserver called WOS Portable that includes Apache, PHP (4 and 5), MySQL, ImageMagick, and the Typo3 content management system. The "WOS" is for "webserver on a stick".