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How to run OWS without installing

Posted: 09 Sep 2020, 07:18
by Janak Mulani
Can OWS be run from a portable USB stick?

Officially, OpenWebStart will probably never publish a portable version. The main reason for this is that comfortable operation is only possible with the help of file associations. The Windows registry entries required for this are created during installation.

But if you can (and want to) do without the file associations, you can create a portable version yourself.

All files required for execution are located in the installation directory. It is therefore sufficient to copy this directory onto a USB stick and then to run javaws.exe and itw-settins.exe by mounting the USB stick on the target computer.

If you want the settings and the cache to remain on the USB stick, the path to your two directories can be set with the following environment variables:
- XDG_CACHE_HOME (default:% USER_HOME% \. Cache)
- XDG_CONFIG_HOME (default:% USER_HOME% \. Config)

In that case it is recommended to create a small batch script that sets the two variables and then executes javaws.exe.and itw-settings.exe

Synopsis:
javaws.exe [url-to-jnlp | path-to-jnlp] [options]

It should also be mentioned that two things usually change with a new release of OWS:
- \ openwebstart.jar (the application must be updated)
- \ jre \ (the supplied JRE which is used to run OpenWebStart)