Running Emacs from a USB drive

Running Emacs from a USB drive

[thorne]

Hello all.  If i want to run my own Emacs on various random MS-Windows
machines, is it as simple as unpacking a Windows binary distribution
onto a USB drive or iPod or whatever, and maybe making a site-start.el
to grok the current drive letter and set that as the home directory?

I am guessing there is more to it than that...?

-- 
þ    theron tlåx    þ
(compose-mail (concat "thorne@" (rot13 "gvzoeny") ".net"))

Re: Running Emacs from a USB drive

[B. T. Raven]

thorne wrote:
> Hello all.  If i want to run my own Emacs on various random MS-Windows
> machines, is it as simple as unpacking a Windows binary distribution
> onto a USB drive or iPod or whatever, and maybe making a site-start.el
> to grok the current drive letter and set that as the home directory?
> 
> I am guessing there is more to it than that...?
> 

If I understand this aright:

http://at-aka.blogspot.com/2006/06/portable-emacs-22050-on-usb.html

then you will first have to grok the mount point of the flash drive and only 
after running emacs from there will the data-directory variable include the 
drive letter. If you could somehow arrange to have this drive letter added 
to the path then you could have a batch file in the root of the flash drive 
run emacs. A kludge would be to add all the letters d:\ ... z:\ to the 
global path of the local machine. I don't know whether the site-start.el 
undoes the setenv "HOME" when emacs exits.

Ed

Re: Running Emacs from a USB drive

[poti]

>thorne wrote:

> Hello all.  If i want to run my own Emacs on various random MS-Windows
> machines, is it as simple as unpacking a Windows binary distribution
> onto a USB drive or iPod or whatever, and maybe making a site-start.el
> to grok the current drive letter and set that as the home directory?
Hello, 
I do this on the zero-config DVD I have made for TeX Live. Have a look 
at the tex-live.el file at 
http://potis.org/software/livedvd
I use 
(setq DVD (substring invocation-directory 0 (- (string-match "Emacs" invocation-directory) 1)))
to get the letter, and go from there. In my approach, the DVD, or MO
drive, or iPod, can be used on any machine, not just any Windows
machine (in principle, I am still working on some space issues and MacOS
X). On a DVD, you can use an autorun.inf file. On other media, I used a
shortcut to Emacs/bin/runemacs.exe .

This is my first post to this list, so sorry for not threading and 
quoting properly.
-Poti