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Re: Portable Cygwin on a CD


I'm thinking "autorun".. don't know why (yet)..

On Mon, 5 May 2003 fergus@bonhard.uklinux.net wrote:
> There was something on this quite recently, but it turned out to be
> mainly about licensing issues. I'm only interested in getting something
> to work for personal use. If that can be managed, then I'll worry about
> licensing issues, if any. (If it sounds it, that remark isn't intended
> to be either arrogant or cheeky. It just seems to be a sensible order to
> do things in.)
If it's just for personal use, there are no licensing issues AFAIK.

> The whole shebang is initiated by simply putting the CD into any Windows
> machine and "Run"ing the command
This is where I start thinking "autorun"
Would it be possible (my guess is that it certainly would) to make an 
autorun.ini file that runs a simple Windows program (compiled, say, with 
the -mno-cygwin option) that
a. looks which drive it is on (in argv[0])
b. runs mount
c. runs rxvt

> The only not entirely simple aspect of the thing is, or seems to be, the
> requirement to type the command
>     mount -f "l:/" "/"
That would be fixed with the autorun :)

> at some point after starting up. I've tried any number of ways of
> automating this to take place early in /etc/profile or ~/.bash_profile
> (mount -f "$HOMEDRIVE" "/" or whatever, but HOMEDRIVE isn't known until
> it's mounted ...). The requirement for this line is basically that
> Cygwin needs to be told the drive letter of the CD drive. (Or, if Cygwin
> doesn't, then system() calls from within the application certainly do.)
As your autorun won't need Cygwin (because you've compiled it with 
-mno-cygwin) your chicken-and-egg problem is gone :)

> Well, that's what's intended, and it works quite beautifully in a 98
> machine. Those of you more used than I am to the hideous imposed
> architectures of identities, administrators, privileges, etc (and
> understanding them a lot better, since you could hardly understand them
> worse, believe me) will not be surprised to be told that simply walking
> up to somebody else's NT or XP machine and inserting the CD and starting
> it up, leads to a failure of the mount command described above,
> signified by the message
>     mount: /: permission denied
I *think* that is a question of the permissions you have in the registry - 
you'll need to use user mounts to take care of that (WAG)

> Can anybody please help me make progress, either by telling me of any
> switches for the mount command that will attend to the access problems
> implied by the above error message or (just as good, though depressing)
> letting me know that I'm on a hiding to nothing and that in an
> environment where most machines are NT / 2K / XP and not 98, there are
> always going to be insur-mount-able problems of this kind in attempting
> to run a portable Cygwin application?
> (Quick thought: if I put everything under l:\Cygwin rather than l:\,
> would that make a difference at all?)
Would make it look nicer, but I don't think it will change anything 
profound..

I'd be *really* interested if you get this working :)

rlc



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