[rkward-users] [Help] RE: Rkward for windows on usb drive

[SourceForge.net]

The following forum message was posted by tfry at http://sourceforge.net/projects/rkward/forums/forum/165574/topic/3692612:

Hi,

yes, this should be possible. In fact, one of my RKWard installations on Windows rests on an external harddrive. I have just tried it on a different machine (with rather lax permissions, though), and that appears to work just fine.

There are a few small gotchas:
- RKWard expects to be in the same place as KDE, so the usb key will need to contain a KDE installation, as well. My installation of KDE, including rkward, is roughly 900MB in size. That comprises a number of development-related packages that you do not need to install to run RKWard, but I would guess, you will need roughly half of that space (does anybody have a figure on that?).
- KDE tries to create menu-entries during installaiton, RKWard tries to put an icon on the desktop. I\'m not sure whether that is possible with your permissions, and how the installers will react, if the permissions are lacking. Possibly you will have to use a different windows-machine (with more liberal permission) to complete the installation on the usb stick. The executables get installed to <KDEDIR>/bin; for starting RKWard, use <KDEDIR>/bin/rkward.bat (*not* rkward.bin.exe).
- I don\'t know, whether R is installed on your office-machine, or whether you would have to install that on the usb as well. In either case, the RKWard installation needs to point to the correct location of R, which may be an issue, if the key gets assigned different drive-letters on different occasions. If RKWard does not start at all, you may need to edit rkward.bat with a text-editor, and adjust the path to R.

If there are any problems, please ask. Also, if it just works, a note would be nice as well. This might be of interest to other, too (and based on this, perhaps we can provide a live CD-image for people to play with).

Regards
Thomas