Re: [MiKTeX] Portable version of MikTeX

[Paul M. <p.f...@gm...>]

On 13/02/2008, Cornelius C. Noack <no...@it...> wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Feb 2008, Paul Moore wrote:
>
>  > I know this has been discussed before, but I cannot find any
>  > information relating to a version of MikTeX later than 2.5.
>  >
>  > Is it possible to create a "portable" version of MikTeX, which
>  > can be run from a USB drive, or similar.
[...]
>  I am not quite sure that I understand what exactly you want to
>  achieve: You want to "run from a USB drive" .

OK. I'll try to clarify, now that I've done some experiments.

I want to put the MikTeX software onto a USB pen drive (I have a 4GB
drive, which should be fine - my minimal install of MikTeX 2.7 is 220
MB in size). I want to be able to plug that drive into a machine I've
never used before, possibly a secured PC where I don't have access to
the registry and/or to the local disks, and be able to create PDF
documents from (La)TeX sources.

When I'm finished, I want to remove my pen drive and leave nothing
that needs clearing up on the PC I used.

The two ways this scenario often goes wrong are:

1. The application requires registry entries that the installer
created. This doesn't seem to be a problem for MikTeX (except possibly
for the package manager and maybe yap, but I don't need these).
2. The application stores data on the hard disk. This does seem an
issue for MikTeX - things like format files are being stored in
Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\MikTeX\2.7. If I
can't stop this happening (preferably by pregenerating the .fmt files
etc, and storing them somewhere on the USB drive) then I won't be able
to use MikTeX the way I want.

The only document I've found on creating a portable MikTeX -
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/info/MiKTeX+Ghostscript+GSview+USB-drive-HOWTO.txt
- is marked as applying to MikTeX 2.5, and makes no mention of the
application data directory. This either means that the HOWTO doesn't
cover this, or that it's a new feature since 2.5. Either way, the
document doesn't help me. (I also don't like its approach of having
setup and tidy-up scripts to run - I find that it's too easy, when
shutting down in a rush, to forget to run the tidy-up script.)

With this explanation, can anyone offer me any suggestions?

Thanks,
Paul.