Going Portable

[Duer 157099]

Apparently I've waited a sufficiently long time to consider going completely portable, because it looks as though all or enough tools are now available to do what I think will simplify my (and maybe your) computing life.

Now I'm not talking about using a laptop for my computing needs (although it encompasses that) nor using an iPhone or whatever other devices people use (I don't use any of them, actually). But this strategy was developed precisely for those types of users, but as a side benefit, it will also enable many of us to compute with fewer problems (at least that's the goal; until I actually test everything out I won't know for sure).

For me, the genesis of this was trying to segregate my operating system (WinXP) from everything else so that upon those inevitable occasions where a reinstall of the OS must occur, it could be as quick and painless as possible. Just reinstall the OS on the C drive and have the D (or whichever) drive already have all of the programs I use. Unfortunately, for any of you who have thought about or tried this, you know that it's not always (not even usually) possible, because so many programs just cannot resist storing some things in places on the C drive (in Documents and Settings, for example, or the registry).

However, there has been an explosion in the development of applications that are small and portable, such as can be stored on a USB drive and used in whichever machine you plug the USB drive into -- without doing anything to the machine (or very minor things, it varies by program). You can imagine this being useful if you have multiple computers in multiple locations, or if you suddenly need to replace a computer and want to be back up and running in no time, or if you want to use someone else's computer temporarily without all your "stuff" getting left behind.

There are portable versions of OpenOffice, GIMP, NotepadPlus, Firefox, etc - I can't think of any application that I depend on daily that does not have a portable (and open source) version available. For free. FREE!

So here are a couple of sites that have gotten me started down that path:

http://portableapps.com/

http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php

If you have been doing this already, what has been your experience? Pitfalls to consider?

[Statistical]

1. Another option is

2 drives.

1) OS & Apps
2) data

you can redirect user profiles ("My documents" in xp) to another drive.

Once you install OS, all patches, all drivers, all aplications on C: you make an image of it using a program like ghost.

To reinstall you wipe c:\ and reinstall from ghost image. Periodically you update the image.

Nice thing is reinstalling from an image is easy, fast, and requires no interaction.

[RoyGBiv]

2. Been using Portableapps for awhile ...

They're pretty handy. I basically carry around a mini-system in my pocket that I can plug in to any computer I have access to that has an open USB port.

I started using them for work initially. It's a convoluted story I won't bore you with, but it boils down to my boss being technologically illiterate and our IT director being a moron. It took me, literally, months to do a project I was doing while waiting on them to do things I needed them to do. Portableapps helped me cut them out of the process.

Now I have a couple of USB sticks on which I carry around full Portableapp installs. I use them all the time.

A couple things to consider:

1) USB sticks are not created equally. Some (most?) aren't very speedy, and this can mess with things like web browsing if you have certain options enabled. For example, with Firefox, the act of saving items to a cache will slow down the browser to the point it appears to freeze. It actually is quicker on a slower USB stick to have the cache turned off as well as the option to allow saving sessions that can be recovered in case of a crash.

2) Things like Flash can't be fully supported in a portable environment. You can get them to work, but it's not the same easy process it is on a "normal" system.

Carrying around your own portable, bootable system is an option. I have mini-XP on a stick as well as a working Linux system. Getting both working was a "I'm bored, let's see if I can do this" type of project, and I probably couldn't repeat the process quickly if threatened. Struggle4progress has had some experience and success in this area, however.

[struggle4progress]

3. I think most stuff runs awful slow off thumbdrives. If you're merely interested

in segregating apps and user files from the OS, Linux might be a friendlier environment than Windows; see, for example, https://help.ubuntu.com/9.04/installation-guide/i386/directory-tree.html

I successfully installed Leopard on a 16GB flash, off the installation CD, as an experiment: it worked but it was verrrrrrrrrrrrry slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. If you're going to put stuff on flashdrives, I'd recommend a copy of your system installation CD; I did this with Leopard and put it aside in a drawer; later, I was glad I had, because in the course of trying to set up an OSX/Vista/Ubuntu triple boot I thoroughly bolloxed my disks, to the point the CD/DVD reader wouldn't work -- but I could do enough repairs off the flash to get back in the game

A number of the Linux distros contain utilities letting you install the distro to a flash. Otherwise you can use Unetbootin (or a similar utility) on an iso to create a Linux system on a flash: then editing some system files will be necessary to obtain a persistent installation that actually saves your changes, and further intelligence may enable you to obtain a more secure flash that doesn't automatically boot to desktop with root privileges -- I'm vague here because although I've tested setting up persistent user accounts, I haven't figured out how to solve the auto-boot-to-root issue (though somebody out there must have figured this out)