G'day! I recently bought myself a flash drive with enough space for me to install a C++ IDE & compiler. the trouble is, to make the IDE "portable", it would need to be self contained (by that I mean, no registry editing). The Eclipse IDE does not have an install process, which is a good sign, and it is very simple to copy MinGW over once I have installed it on my HD. The trouble is, when I tested it at school, when I pressed Compile it said that the administrator has disabled registry editing. Then, it found the "make" program, but that tried to call g++, but could not find it. g++ definitely exists in the same directory as mingw32-make, and the only step in the setup of Eclipse, CDT (the C++ plug-in) and MinGW was the addition of the bin directory for MinGW (which contains the compilers) to the system environment path, as I do not have access to that on the school computers. Is there a way that can fix this? Alternatively, do you know of any other IDEs/compilers for C++ that could be run off a flash drive? Thanks!

my personal favorite IDE is Code::Blocks. I use the nightly builds, which apparently work on a flash drive if you move one file.
so if you decide to use Code::Blocks, you would install the folder 'codeblocks'(or whatever you decide to name it) into your preferred directory in the flash drive, and then you want to run Code::Blocks once to have it generate your config files. after that, copy the file 'C:\Documents and Settings\<User>\Application Data\codeblocks\default.conf' to the folder containing 'codeblocks.exe'. From that point forward, Code::Blocks will run off the thumb drive.

On my computer, my codeblocks folder is around 32 megs, and my MingW folder is 73.8, so using these two together would require a flash drive of at least 128 megs, but seeing as how I'm one of the few people who will actually go out and buy a flash drive of 64 megs(or more like a 3 pack), you should be good to go.

hope that helps, and if you need any more help, don't hesitate to PM me.
-Wynter Woods(aka Zerotri)

Hmm, if what you are saying is true, then I believe that I should be able to get eclipse to work, too. I was using Code::Blocks at one point, and so I know that its compiler is MinGW as well. The thing is, my trouble seems to be with MinGW and not Eclipse. If I tell Eclipse the specific location of mingw32-make (the makefile maker) then it can run it no trouble. But make calls g++, and I'm pretty sure it expects an environment path so that it can find g++... but then again, once I removed the environment path to mingw from my computer at home, it still found it fine, somehow. It seems to come apart once I press compile, then it needs to edit the registry for something, but it is not allowed to do so.

I will try to get eclipse to work, but if not, I will put code blocks on to see how that goes. Could you please send me a link to a page that discusses this?

thanks

Here is the page.
also, I think that code::blocks runs each of the programs on it's own, and therefore eliminates the need for environment variables...but then again, I could be entirely wrong about that.
hopefully all goes well,
-Wynter Woods(aka Zerotri)

Thanks a lot, but I've stuffed my flash drive (that's what happens when you buy things from Hong Kong off Ebay very cheaply).

I still think this whole scenario is odd, but I suppose it doesn't really matter now.

Thanks again.

[Edited by - Silvo on February 16, 2007 6:41:19 PM]