Portable desktop/applications for Linux. We have some wintools but with issues

[Luke Dashjr]

On Monday 18 August 2008 09:20:34 Oren Beck wrote:
> Many people I know are constant users of the portableapps suite. As it
> makes life easier in several ways.

Actually, it's just retarded. First of all, the term "portable" with regard to 
applications has already been used for decades to mean "compiles and runs on 
many variety of OS". I don't care what term they want to use, but they should 
at least not overlap with an already existing and commonly used term!

Secondly, their "idea" is nothing much more than simply exporting HOME to the 
USB stick prior to executing applications off it... if the binaries themselves 
are truly portable, which is at best the case when the kernel syscalls are 
compatible, and never across BSD/Linux/Windows boundaries.

> I had thought of using a USB HD resident distro in QEMU mode, began research
> on "how-to's" and found issues mitigating the full urility.Such as - QEMU
> mode distros to my research depend on unfree code in a windows environment
> at present. Is my understanding correct?

No. Qemu is GPL and cannot be linked with unfree code at all.

> And public kiosk mode sites like the Kc Library might not let me load QEMU
> at all.

Kiosks generally won't let you load foreign binaries at all. Not just qemu, 
but also Thunderbird or anything else. If they allow executing arbitrary 
binaries, then qemu should work just fine out of the box.