So I got a 4GB USB stick for xmas. In trying to come up with the most productive use for it (rather than simply storing a bunch of music etc) I have spent the past few hours installing a whole lot of Portable Apps for Windows onto it. This way I really won’t need to carry my laptop around. So far I’ve got working:
- Portable OpenOffice, Firefox (with my fav extensions), Thunderbird, Sunbird, ClamWin, Suduko and Gaim from the PortableApps Suite
- InstantRails (incl. Apache, MySql, phpMyAdmin) and RadRails (requires JRE on the USB stick or on host computer)
- DSL 3.1 (Damn Small Linux - Embedded version, just download and run, what fun!)
- Portable Skype (it works with Skype 3 even though the website hasn’t been updated yet)
- Portable RSSOwl (it works with RSSOwl 1.2.3, just replace the main app folder)
- Inkscape
- IrfanView
- GIMP Portable
- Notepad++
- NVU Portable
- PortaPutty
- WinSCP Portable Edition
- 7-Zip Portable
- CDex
- And I still have more than 3GB remaining!!
Some apps required special “Portable” editions, mostly when they would normally make use of the Windows registry, and some you can simply decompress or install and then copy/paste onto the stick.
Initially I was planning to somehow squeeze Ubuntu onto it and then install all these (or equivalent) applications and run them that way, but this seems more sensible for the time being. The next trick will be setting up automated backups, data security, and virus protection (it has ClamWin already but I have to remember to use it).