INSTALLING QT CREATOR IDE IN AN EXTERNAL PORTABLE DRIVE

[base_load]

Hey guys. I am a newbie in this forum. I have used
QT for quite sometime. However, I lost my machine and I thought maybe there is a way I could create a portable version of the IDE and place it on my flash disk so that I may be able to continue developing my project on any windows machine I come across on the fly.
Any solution please? Thank you.

[mrjj]

Hi. sorry to hear about your pc.

it has many issued being portable
https://portableapps.com/node/19930

Would work better to have linux on the stick and boot into that and use Qt there.

IF your windows is new enough, you can also use windows2Go
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-portable-windows-go-usb-drive/
Sorry , Enterprise only. (doh)

[hunger]

Running Creator from "unusual" locations in the file system should be perfectly doable. So installing Creator onto an USB stick and running it from there should not be a problem.

You do want to make sure PATH is properly set to pick up extra tools from the same USB stick you run Qt Creator on and you also want to make sure the Qt Creator instance can be always found in the same place (e.g. by using a symlink, bind-mount or just copying the whole thing into some fixed location on the HDD).

Once that is done you probably also want your toolchains, Qt versions, cmake binaries, version control systems, etc. on your USB stick. Otherwise those need to be installed on all machines. Make sure these also end up in fixed places somehow: Creator does save their absolute paths and might break your kits if they change.

The next challenge are your user settings: These need to match up with the .user files in your project or a new configuration for your project will be created for you when you open it again. User settings are saved in %APPDATA%/Roaming/... or $HOME/.config/..., so they tend to end up on the machines and not on the USB stick. When you are back on a machine the existing configuration for that machine will be picked up again, so you will need to re-configure your project once per machine.

The simplest way to get a fully portable development environment with Qt Creator is probably to put everything into a virtual machine or container. The latter is much faster, so go for that if your OS supports containers:-)

[base_load]

@hunger thanks. Am gonna try that. But in the meantime, could you walk through the following idea, of course which I suspect is a shoddy one...

Suppose you had a SATA/IDE DRIVE TO USB ADAPTOR
And a spare internal hard disk.
Suppose that you installed the spare internal HDD into your computer and then proceeded installing ,say, Windows 10 OS into the drive then followed by QT IDE ,say, QT 5.1. into the drive into a easily accessible folder. Assuming you assigned it a drive R, for the sake of resolving drive letter assigning dispute(I mean lowering the probability of drive letter assignment collision dispute)
Now, suppose you uninstalled the internal HDD, and used the SATA/IDE DRIVE TO USB ADAPTOR to mount the internal HDD on another computer running Windows 10 through a usb port, and assigning it drive letter R.
Would the QT installation run correctly while resolving all its dependencies correctly??

[mrjj]

Hi
You will have to install the win 10 while the disk is attached via USB
and also later boot on that windows on the usb disk .
If you dont boot it, then %APPDATA%/Roaming will be wrong but might work anyway.
However, all paths etc are in the USB windows and not setup on the new pc. so i doubt it will just work.

But yes, it seems possible
http://uk.pcmag.com/operating-systems-and-platforms/88253/feature/how-to-run-windows-10-from-a-usb-drive
"With WinToUSB, you can create the bootable drive from any version of the operating system and on any type of USB drive. "
But its both slow and u must activate windows when you run it.
But it will run creator etc.