Stuff to Put into My Thumbdrive
With advent of 65-nm flash technology and the 32GB flash drive, we are studying seeing storage move to the next level. So, I would like to start a list of favorite software I would like on my flash drive.
My Portable Thumbdrive should probably contain:
- Portable Firefox. This application is important for general purpose web browsing. Since, a lot of applications are now accessible over the web it is important that we have one. (Filesize 6.3 MB).
- Portable Thunderbird is a very good open source application for reading email, newgroup and news feeds. It is also developed by the Mozilla foundation. (Filesize 7.0 MB).
- Portable OpenOffice is the complete OpenOffice.org office suite — including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database. Your own portable moving office. (Filesize 74.7 MB).
- Portable Gaim is a versatile Instant Messaging client that supports multiple protocols include ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger, Google Talk and many others. (Filesize 5.7 MB).
- Portable Putty is a portable version of putty that stores configuration information in a file instead of the MS Windows registry. Putty is a really good open source secure shell client that supports a number of SSH features including: high encryption, tunnelling and good customizable interface. This application is vital for remote server management. (Filesize 0.5 MB).
- … and you still have space to throw in XAMPP, a portable Apache, MySQL and PHP server. Now you can serve web pages off your thumbdrive. This one has flavors for Linux, MacOSX and Windows. (Filesize 77 MB can be as low as 13 MB).
- … and since I love Linux so much. I probably should also have Feather Linux. This is a portable Linux distrubution based on Knoppix that runs entirely off a USB thumbdrive. (Filesize 128 MB).
This is just a total of 300 MB. If I get a 1 GB thumbdrive that is a lot of space to spare for data.
Most of these applications can be found in PortableApps.com. This cool website has a list of all the possible software you should probably be carrying around. The key characteristic with components like these is that they don’t require access to the operating system configuration system (MS Windows registry, Unix/Linux /etc filesystem) and they minimize removable filesystem reads and writes. There is a nice description of a Portable Application here.
