On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 11:22 -0500, Luke Dashjr wrote:
Secondly, their "idea" is nothing much more than simply exporting HOME to the USB stick prior to executing applications off it... if the binaries themselves are truly portable, which is at best the case when the kernel syscalls are compatible, and never across BSD/Linux/Windows boundaries.
There is a bit more to it. The binaries are usually compiled as static and as a result depend on far fewer things in the host system. While I have yet to see a USB key containing apps to run on every system, I heard of successful attempts and building a USB flash suite that will run on Win/Mac/Linux by having the applicable binaries for each platform, but all sharing the same user data. While it may be impossible to hit 100% portability, it is possible to land above 75%.
No. Qemu is GPL and cannot be linked with unfree code at all.
Don't even go there. You can't *redistribute* it with unfree additions to the code. The GPL lets you link it against whatever you want.
Kiosks generally won't let you load foreign binaries at all. Not just qemu, but also Thunderbird or anything else. If they allow executing arbitrary binaries, then qemu should work just fine out of the box.
Qemu is a resource hog, and some of the features (like bridging network connectivity) don't work without admin privileges. So while Qemu might be just as likely to *run*, it doesn't mean it is just as likely to *work as intended*.
~Bradley