Friday, March 7, 2008

My (Work) Life on a Key, XWiki, and other portables applications

Now that I am back in consulting business, I often have customers where I am not allowed to connect my Mac on the network. Annoying!!!! But this is not a big issue since now it is easy to bring you environment on a USB key.

XWikey: my wiki on a key

On a daily business, I have installed my personal XWiki on my 2Gb USB Key, and a JDK (for windows, on OSX I am using the default one). So with this solutions I have my personal CMS, Website and applications with me, and I can use it from any computer available. I work on any site, any meeting room directly on my Wiki even when I am not connected. I am using a packaged Entprise XWiki that comes with Jetty and HSQL, so it is a complete and self contained environment. I just changed the start and stop scripts to point to the JDK that is on the key. Nothing exceptional here, but it is very useful.

Others portable applications

I know that a Wiki is not enough most of the time to " bring your life with you", and you may want more, such as Open Office, Mail and Web clients, ... Some of the packages you can use:

The next test will be to run the OS from the key, I have not done it yet, have you? Some options for this:

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4 comments:

  1. TonyMarch 7, 2008 at 12:47 PM

    Neat!

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  2. AnonymousMay 27, 2008 at 3:50 AM

    Hey Tug,

    Interesting post... What DB are you using on the USB Key ?


    Cheers,
    Ben

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  3. Tug GrallMay 28, 2008 at 12:29 AM

    Hi Ben,

    I am simply using the DB that is provided with the XWiki that is a the classical Java base HSQLDB.

    It is not the most performant and scalable one but it is really useful for this specific usage since you do not have anything to do. (many products are using this to embed a database to easily deploy/test product... remember Collaxa - I think it was PointBase back then).


    Tug

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  4. MånsAugust 7, 2008 at 9:43 AM

    Hi Tug,

    What did you writ in the bat-file to direct it to the jdk on the thumb-drive - I'm a little confused when I look at the code as I'm a total newbie in this field - I have ported my jdk to the thumbdrive and I can run xwiki (In my case it's xwiki workspaces)but its due to the fact that its installed on the pc.
    Will you post your code??
    I excuse my poor english - I'm danish..

    Yours sincerely

    ReplyDelete