portable install on usb flash drive?

[chris]

Dick Repasky wrote:
> I'd like to install cygwin on a usb flash drive so that I can plug the drive
> into any windows box and have cygwin available to me.  The question is: will
> this work? My concern is not having registry keys in place on machines into
> which I plug in the flash drive.  Will that be a problem?  
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Dick
> 
> 

Just one piece of advice. Consider "upx"ing all of the .dlls and .exes 
(upx allows you to compress .exes and .dlls so they are automatically 
expanded when run), this can make the distribution quite a lot smaller. 
Make sure you get the closed-source upx from the home-page rather than 
the one distributed from cygwin if you want to make really small 
executables.

I'm actually going to have a go at "cygwin-on-a-key" shortly, because 
I'm going to buy one soon :) So let us know how you get on. I've heard 
that cygwin writes / reads from the registry so will have to have a look 
at that.

I am really only interested in using cygwin, and don't really care about 
users (if it is avoidable), but having xfree86,bash and a splattering of 
utils in 64MB or so would be really useful :)




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