MiKTeX will become portable
Christian Schenk announced on April 2nd that he’s planning to release a portable MiKTeX edition later this year. The portable edition will allow you to run MiKTeX from a flash drive:
- you could carry MiKTeX on a portable drive for use on any Windows computer,
- configuration settings will be stored on the portable drive and not on the host computer,
- using the portable edition won’t leave traces on the host computer,
- administrator privileges on the host computer won’t be necessary.
Christian said that a beta will be released soon, on April 6th he has noted that also the package manager will be available with the portable edition and that packages will be on installed on the flash drive.
That’s a good news!
(Except for the fact that coping many small files to a flash drive takes a lot of time. I wonder if one can avoid it.)
I have been running MiKTeX from a Flash drive for about 3 years now. If you want to know how to make MiKTeX portable (including the package manager) you may continue reading here:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/MiKTeX+Ghostscript+GSview+USB-drive-HOWTO.txt
Hi Memming,
I’m happy about those news too, because now I can expect an easy solution instead of building it myself. Unfortunately a LaTeX distribution contains a lot of small files, and the speed depends on a file system that’s effective, caching and of course on the port speed.
I’ve been using one for a couple of years. One version is here http://elwito.wordpress.com/2008/08/31/portable-latex-environment-2/
However, if MikTeX provide it, it’d be a great news.
@Memming: To avoid long copying time, what I do is zipping the whole directory. Every time I work on a computer, I just copy the zipped file to its desktop, unzip it, and here we go.
Hi Alexander, hi Dan,
the links provided by you are showing that there’s a need for a portable solution. If the MiKTeX programmer would provide it directly that would be great. I’m sure that he can benefit from the work of the other people trying to make MiKTeX portable themselves.
It’s been released – have a look here.