Re: Portable AbiWord

Alan Horkan wrote:

> If you were to build Abiword using Microsoft Visual C++ you are likely to
> get a smaller binary and you could compress the whole thing.
>
> I'm sure abiword has grown since 1.0 but if I recall correctly mingwin
> does produce a larger binary. In the past all I had to do to make a
> portable abiword was UPX compress a single binary and slap it on a floppy
> disk.

I'd like to avoid a recompile, actually. One of the goals of all of the
portable apps I've been working on is to stick to the actual, official
binaries with only external modifications (UPX of the DLLs and EXEs,
7zip recompression of JARs, etc)

>>- A launcher (or wrapper) called PortableAbiWord.exe is added that sets
>>a fake USERPROFILE environment variable before calling AbiWord.exe.
>>This points AbiWord to the portable device to store its settings, making
>>it portable.
>
> I never bothered to do this though, probably could have faked it with a
> batch file if I'd wanted. I used abiword on a floppy just to show off,
> the lack of room for a dictionary made it impractical for more regular
> use.

I believe it can be faked with a batch file. But that has quite a bit
less polish. I'm packaging these on the assumption that this will be
many people's very first exposure to some of these apps like AbiWord, so
I'm trying to keep it solid and dead easy (unzip and run).

> Nice to have more interest in Abiword.

There have been a number of positive reviews of it. It lends itself
perfectly to those that have smaller USB thumbdrives and can't, for
instance, use a full copy of OpenOffice.org (the portable version of
which weighs in at 144MB... soon decreasing to a bit over 120MB). By
comparison, the portable version of AbiWord weighs in at a bit over 14MB.

> You probably should not be using the copyright A-Swoosh artwork without
> the express permission of the owner - namely Dom Lachowicz - especially
> since you are overtly soliciting donations, making yours very much a
> commercial enterprise.

If you mean on the webpage, I was using it as it was actually a
distribution of the official AbiWord release (albeit in an unofficial
delivery mechanism). I am soliciting donations for my portable work
after resisting for the first year and a half I'd been working on them.
  Eventually, several users convinced me to so that I could at least try
to pay my hosting bills as I'd been funding it entirely out-of-pocket up
until November. (I started work on Portable Firefox back in June of
2004.) The new PortableApps.com site is going to require a dedicated
box due to its popularity and donations will hopefully be helping with that.

I haven't actually gotten any donations for Portable AbiWord itself and
if the link is an issue I can remove it.

http://portableapps.com/apps/office/word_processors/portable_abiword

Ultimately, I'm hoping to increase the exposure on some of the
less-well-known apps that can be portable (like AbiWord) and, hopefully,
increase their donations, code contributions, developer pool, etc.

> pap!

heh, pap... Portable AbiWord Personal. Another odd acroynm. Portable
OpenOffice.org is POO, which I just shake my head at. I only abbreviate
it as Portable OO.o. At least things like Portable Firefox and Portable
Thunderbird don't make anything silly.

> those policies were very old from back when Sourcegear were running the
> show, but Dom has the authority to decide some other agreement.

Anyone know how I can get in touch with Dom directly?

> Abiword was happy to welcome Maemo into the fold, and perhaps the
> developers might also decide to provide an official build of Portable
> Abiword (I'm not sure but in the past UPX compressed builds of just the
> exe may have been provided, but I'm not sure if anyone is doing nightly
> builds anymore but if they are I'm sure I'll be promptly corrected.)

Maemo? AbiWord runs on a mobile phone? That's cool. Why isn't that on
the AbiWord site?

> U3? I misread that as U2 for a minute and thought they had expanded from
> just promoting iPods.

U3 is a new 'platform' for running portable applications from
specialized USB thumbdrives being pushed by M-Systems and Sandisk. They
contracted me to adapt open source software to work on their platform.
I accepted and put some of my web application development stuff on hold
as I think it's an excellent opportunity to showcase open source
software to a new audience... especially regular business folks.

> Since you are on the list I didn't CC you

No need, I've been on the dev list for a while. I've chimed in when I
can add a little.

> Thanks for helping promote Abiword.

No problem. The more people we have using apps like AbiWord, the better.

Regards,
John
Received on Tue Jan 10 16:17:51 2006