NeoOffice/J on USB Key?

[PJW]

Just a quick question, is it possible to install NeoOffice/J onto a USB Flash Disk and run it from there?

If so, would it then be possible to run from the USB key on another Mac (different to the one where it was installed)?

[sardisson]

Officially, no. /Applications is the only supported location for installing NeoOffice/J.

There are two very important reasons for this. First, a bunch of the underlying OOo code expects things to be installed in a single known place and never moved, so there are lots of hard-coded pathnames in the app (and while our brave Mac porting team has nixed a number of these references, many still remain, e.g., in the preferences).

Secondly, because of the above and because searching an entire large disk for the Neo/J install location could take "forever," the patch installers only look in /Applications for the Neo/J app to update.

That said, unofficially, if you're really adventurous and careful, you could probably get it to work (we won't really support any problems ).

1. Install Neo/J in /Applications for the first time (Don't launch it).
   
2. Immediately move Neo/J to your USB key.
   
3. Never rename your USB key once you have ever launched Neo/J.
   
4. Copy ~/Library/NeoOfficeJ-1.1 to your key and then into ~/Library/NeoOfficeJ-1.1 on other machines if you want your settings to remain the same/in sync on multiple machines. Repeat after each session.
   
5. Move Neo/J back to /Applications before opening the patch update .pkg, then immediately move Neo/J back to the same place on your USB key (Don't launch Neo/J).
   

If you have /Applications symlinked to your USB key, some of the complexity is removed (Neo/J more-or-less supports situations where /Applications is on a second drive/partition and where /Applications on the main drive has been replaced by a UNIX symbolic link to its location on the second drive).

Smokey

[Waldo]

This is a good FAQ question...

But is the best place to put it the current neowiki or is there going to be a new one soon?

W

[OPENSTEP]

Just a reminder...if you do start playing around with putting it on non-system disks...

Put it on a drive that does not have any spaces in its name and only in folders that do not have spaces in the folder names.

I know I haven't done major testing on this but the underlying OOo has had historical problems when dealing with spaces in paths. Most other Unix users nearly never put spaces in their drives or folders since they're a pain in the a$* to type on a command line As a result, many of the scripts within OOo itself don't escape spaces and, voila, generate incorrect command lines.

I think we've ferreted most of those out of OOo already but it's still a good idea to be wary.

ed

[sardisson]

[Guest]