More Portable Gis

FWTools ShellFWTools Shell

Robert Wood liked the sound of the idea of running GIS from a flash USB drive for those emergencies so he went out and tried to get the great FWTools running.

After playing around a bit with 1.0.0a7 (windows release) I found I could get it to work by doing the following:

  • Edit the setfw and openev batch files so that instead of a hard coded path, the home directory is set using %cd% to supply the current directory
  • Copying the shortcuts into the fwtools directory and removing the absolute paths from them (the OpenEV icon gets lost, but that isn’t fatal).

I’ve tried it and its works fairly well. It looks like Robert’s gotten some responses on the FWTools mailing list so maybe we’ll see an updated version that takes advantage of the portability. Many developers have run with this idea of portability and given the larger USB 2.0 flash drives out there, why not? Maybe someone can set up a wiki somewhere to list the instructions for various open source programs to run on portable devices.


Tags
Thoughts

Date
March 3, 2006