SoftMaker's FreeOffice2021 / 2024 + standalone 'component' builds in 'portable' format...
Morning, gang.
Greengeek has slightly "beaten me to the punch" here, I have to say! FreeOffice is the only office suite I've ever packaged/published for the community, following which you may recall I published a 'standalone' version of Textmaker following some discussion around the subject with Mikeb, since most folks only ever seem to use the WP portion of any office suite.....and when I built it a couple of years ago, there was a steady trickle of complaints about Abiword misbehaving itself.....crashing & losing people's work.
The 'standalone' Textmaker worked out really rather nicely, I must say.
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I've been playing around with trying to get Textmaker to work as a self-contained portable for some time. I don't know what I did differently tonight, but for the first time ever I got a small message box come up, stating there was a 'critical error; a resource cannot be found', and instructing me to use a specific variable to locate the main FreeOffice directory. A-ha.....
Well, after that wee piece of info, it all 'fell into place', as it were.....and construction of the 'portable' version was very soon finished. Having done that, I then proceeded to build a 'portable' version of the full FreeOffice suite (since much of the construction was identical), so.....
The FreeOffice 'portable' also has a mini YAD-powered 'StartCenter' GUI.....just to make selection a bit easier. The GUI does remain open behind whatever you've selected, and needs to be manually dismissed, but this was the only way I could figure out to keep the sym-links in place while everything was running. It's the closing of the 'StartCenter' that actually 'closes' everything, and removes the sym-links again. If the GUI is set to auto-close, the launch script thinks usage is over, removes the sym-links, and re-runs the script again, in the process creating a brand new config directory. Which defeats the whole point of being 'portable'....
It may not be as 'tidy' as some of you would like, but it works for me. If anyone's got suggestions on how to let the GUI auto-close without shutting everything down, I'm all ears..! (No, I don't know it all. Far from it. I'm still very much a long-term 'noob'...)
These are all constructed around the current '982' service pack, so as up-to-date as possible.
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For anyone who may be interested in running them this way, the 2021 builds can be found at my MEGA.nz a/c, here:-
https://mega.nz/folder/LShHgaCC#QKEiIMMQDVlvQPdJ5IHcWw
.....while the current, 2024 builds can be found here:-
https://drive.sukudir.com/drive/s/2Lvka ... Dqh2EluhpV
32- AND 64-bit versions of all portables can be found here......however, where the 64-bit packages are the 2021 & 2024 variants, the 32-bit packages are the older 2019 release, I'm sorry to say. Navigate through, and help yourselves to the one you want.
As always; d/l; unzip; place the portable directory anywhere you want.....outside the 'save', of course! Click to enter, click 'LAUNCH' to fire 'em up. There's also optional scripts to add a Menu entry, to start them from wherever they're located, if required. The 'MenuReadMe' explains how to use these.
Hope they're useful. Enjoy.
Mike.