Pets to portable apps

Stuff that has yet to be sorted into a category.
Post Reply
Message
Author
Dromeno
Posts: 534
Joined: Fri 12 Sep 2008, 07:01

Pets to portable apps

#1 Post by Dromeno »

I do not know if this is the right forum for a thread like this. Mods: Suggestions for other places are welcome

The disfunctional packet manager in the most recent Puppy 431

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 72&t=48590

made me think.

Some applications do not really need to be installed but can be parked anywhere - they work as the puppy linux equivalent of portable apps

Is it possible to convert a .pup, .pet or .sfs into a "puppy portable"? And if so, how? Portable programs are far easier to work with compared to installable programs. If I had the choice I would switch to portables completely.

User avatar
MU
Posts: 13649
Joined: Wed 24 Aug 2005, 16:52
Location: Karlsruhe, Germany
Contact:

#2 Post by MU »

you usually can install pets also without petget.

A pet is just a .tar.gz files with additional checksum.
So you can extract it like
tar -xzvf test-123.pet
Ignore the error message, it is caused by the added checksum, but unimportant.

This creates a folder like test-123.
You now can copy the files in it to "/".
Sometimes a postinstall script is included, to run more steps.
You can run it from console like:
cd test-123
./pinstall.sh


You also might use a alternative pet installer from the beginning of the pet development.

Try this version of pkgtool, originally written by Nathan Fisher (grafpup), later modified by Plinej:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=26857
(look for the attachment in Plinejs message)

Mark
[url=http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=173456#173456]my recommended links[/url]

User avatar
technosaurus
Posts: 4853
Joined: Mon 19 May 2008, 01:24
Location: Blue Springs, MO
Contact:

#3 Post by technosaurus »

look at magic ermine - you can package everything in one executable file (but you have to manually tell it to leave out the dependency libraries or it can be huge)
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

Peterm321
Posts: 411
Joined: Thu 29 Jan 2009, 14:09
Location: UK

#4 Post by Peterm321 »

Is it possible to convert a .pup, .pet or .sfs into a "puppy portable"? And if so, how? Portable programs are far easier to work with compared to installable programs. If I had the choice I would switch to portables completely.
Yes, as per above posts.

Some PETs are rather difficult to run portably, I found DILLO, though small, needs installing. Some executables use absolute paths hardcoded into them. :cry:

I agree that portability is the best way to go, for one thing it means that you can keep portable applications on a separate partition. When upgrading the portable programs don't need installing.

One thing I have done is to amend the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH in
~/.bashrc to include the current working directory:

export PATH=".:$PATH"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=".:LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

or

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="./lib:LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

(If I want to keep libraries in $PWD/lib instead of the same directory as the executable).

amigo
Posts: 2629
Joined: Mon 02 Apr 2007, 06:52

#5 Post by amigo »

AppDirs do just that -whether as a wrapper for a program which is normally installed, as a wrapper for scripts contained in the AppDir, or as a compile-in-place source based AppDir. Some of these can still be really portbale on the system -I mean you can moce the app after compiling and it stil works. Only those that can't be configured with relative paths have to be run from the same location they were compiled at.
You can find a bunch of examples here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... d/AppDirs/

Post Reply