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

[Bradley Hook]

On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 11:22 -0500, Luke Dashjr wrote:
> 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.

There is a bit more to it. The binaries are usually compiled as static
and as a result depend on far fewer things in the host system. While I
have yet to see a USB key containing apps to run on every system, I
heard of successful attempts and building a USB flash suite that will
run on Win/Mac/Linux by having the applicable binaries for each
platform, but all sharing the same user data. While it may be impossible
to hit 100% portability, it is possible to land above 75%.

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

Don't even go there. You can't *redistribute* it with unfree additions
to the code. The GPL lets you link it against whatever you want.

> 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.

Qemu is a resource hog, and some of the features (like bridging network
connectivity) don't work without admin privileges. So while Qemu might
be just as likely to *run*, it doesn't mean it is just as likely to
*work as intended*.

~Bradley