vacation time is coming up, and I would like to take my Puppy along, to replace the collection of Windows Portable Apps (www.portableapps.com, if you are interested) I used on my last trip. Worked fine, but since I am making the move to Linux now, why stop halfway ...
To make this work I would like to invite your thoughts, comments and answers to a couple of questions. (Perhaps the result could be made into a How To document in the end.)
(By the way, travel tips for eastern Australia in October and November are also welcome.
)I assume I will have access to public PCs in internet cafes, hotels, public libraries etc., most likely running Windows. So I will likely neither have admin rights nor be able to boot from USB stick.
So what do I need to make Puppy do the job of keeping me in touch with the world ? (Talking about 2.17.1 here, both Puppy and QEMU Puppy, with a potential switch to 3.0 when it comes out. Locally I work with a frugal install that I would like to test-install programs and create files to take along.)
I think the major topics are portability of Puppy, what software to add to the standard edition, how to transfer locally installed programs and data from frugal Puppy to USB Puppy and how to encrypt my more sensitive data like mail.
All this should fit on a 1 GB FAT-formatted USB stick, perhaps even sharing it with some Portable Apps, just in case ...
(Hopefully this sounds like enough of a challenge to make you interested in reading the details.
)Portability: QEMU Puppy seems to be the safest bet in this situation, allowing me to run it as a virtual machine on Windows and Linux PCs, and - if possible - even booting from USB (even though I have not yet managed to work this miracle at home - but perhaps I have given up too early).
I noticed a thread on portable virtual box that looked interesting, but am uncertain if this has advantages over QEMU Puppy, works on Linux PCs as well, needs admin rights and if anybody has much experience with it ?
Additional programs: Probably Firefox and Thunderbird as .pets/.pups, if available - even though the Seamonkey suite is leaner, I am used to the two individual programs, have little extensions like NoScript that work fine for them and know how to transfer mail, bookmarks etc. between local installation and portable one. If it is as easy to copy to Seamonkey and install the same extensions / tools, fine with me, but so far I have not tried. Anybody who has ?
Some encryption tool seems a must. BCrypt is included, but looks a little less comfortable than, say, Truecrypt. (Apart from having to get the latter up and running in Puppy in the first place, that is ...
) While Puppy offers an option to save to an encrypted pup_save_crypta-file, which would be the best solution, I have so far found no way to have QEMU Puppy use this file. (There also has been a reference to a thread on how to mount this encrypted file, but I failed to find it - a link would be most welcome.)Assuming enough remaining space on the stick, OpenOffice.sfs, Wine.sfs and devx_???.sfs come to mind for additional flexibility in case I need to run some Win prog or add something I need to compile from source on the fly. (Perhaps I need also a good bodyguard, in case my girlfriend takes offence when I start working on a computer to compile programs during our vacation ?
) Devx_???.sfs has a special place in the QEMU files, but what about the others - do I need to transfer them into the QEMU Puppy version of pup_save before ?What else does a traveller need ?
Data transfer between local frugal install and USB stick: As to QEMU, it seems that while Puppy uses 2fs for pup_save, the QEMU version uses 3fs. So the simple solution of just copying the local file to the USB stick is out. Solution: Mount both and transfer files manually. Could prove difficult to get them all, especially when transferring complete additional programs installed and tested on frugal Puppy locally. Solution: Transfer program files (.pet, .pup, source) to QEMU (nice FTP-solution included for file transfer between host and guest) and install from within. Looks like it could work, but I hope someone has already figured out a more simple way of doing this.
Well, it is past midnight here, so I cannot think of much else right now.
As I said above, your comments and help are most welcome and appreciated.
If there is interest in this part of my travel preparation, I will gladly update on any successes, solutions and additional questions that I find along the way.
Happy puppying !
