I bought myself a memory stick a few days ago, mainly to store data which I download in a internet coffee shops. I find it quite annoying to transport my laptop every time I just would like to read some mails...
Somehow I found portableapps.com which has a nice collection of tools (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.) which can be copied on the USB memory stick and started from there. This makes it easy to use my favorite browser and mail client...
For me the next question was: can I install Eclipse and Java on the memory stick and use it? Yes, you can :)
Here a short description on what I did:
1.) Copy a current installation of Java to the memory stick. I really copied it, I didn't install it!
2.) Copy Eclipse on the memory stick.
3.) Write a simple batch file to start Eclipse.
that's it!
My directory structure on the memory stick looks like this:
%USB_MEMORY_STICK_ROOT%
| Eclipse.bat
+---Applications
+---jdk1.5.0_05
| \---bin
| \---javaw.exe
|
+---eclipse
\---eclipse.exe
Eclipse.bat looks like this:
.\Applications\eclipse\eclipse.exe
-data .\Projects
-vm .\Applications\jdk1.5.0_05\bin\javaw.exe
-vmargs -Xmx256M
Enjoy :)
