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Re: [school-discuss] USB ThumbDrive trial...

Bill Kendrick <nbs@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>TuxPaint can be taken down to 9 MB using upx & judicious
> use of the delete button (sorry Bill, but no sound effects,
> no furrin languages & they can mirror the stamps any way
> they like... ;-).
>

Fine by me! In fact, it might be useful for me to document this in an FAQ somewhere. :)

-bill!
Gotta run, baby feedin time
LOL!

Actually TuxPaint's down to 5.6 MB.

The upx (.exe & .dll compression) utility is widely used to bring Windows & Linux application sizes down. My other methods are less elegant ... stripping out language support, help & other ancilliary support files.

Some portable app fans have other neat techniques for "portablizing" applications ... WinPenPack uses their "X" environment - a simulated registry & .dll helper Other users are working with the Liberta Project, RegRapper, InstallAnything & the Ceedo Portable Registry. It's a booming mini-industry getting all this stuff to run off of ThumbDrives.

WRT to Java apps (which the Portable app community has found ungainly due to file size & Sun's restrictive distribution terms) I've been able to reduce Sun's JRE mess from 65 MB down to 13.6 MB (25% of the original) using both upx, jar compression and also ripping out the gargantuan Apache/Tomcat/JBoss classtrees in the main runtime rt.jar file. The rt.jar file is still 10.5 MB, but at least not as bad as it used to be... I tried to tear out the CORBA/RMI remote exec class trees but somehow that breaks Java (Sun has created a self-deprecating monster....). That and some other ugly hacks like experimentally tearing out lots of extra files, a couple I'll probably put back in.... IAC this has helped me distribute GeoGebra, Analytic math, GeoNext, Virtual Lab & other otherwise open-sourced Java apps.

/lee




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/lee
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