Portable Minetest

[Murkle]

So, I made a map with some epic stuff, and I want to show my friends, without installing Minetest on their pc. The question is, can I install Minetest on a flash drive? Not only would this be good for sharing stuff, but also for portability so I can play on any pc.

I will attempt this myself, and comment what happens here, but before I get a chance, I want to know your experience with this.

[basil60]

When I start Minetest, I do it from a folder on the desktop. Not installed!!
Works fine!

[solars]

I have a Minetest on an external disk drive. I use a self compiled version. On some Linux-PC it runs, at some it don't. If it don't, it runs when I compile it on the PC, but this will be a problem, when the dev and compiler packages are not installed and you can't touch the drives of the PC.

I can't say, if there problemes of this kind at Windows too.

If you want show your maps, I have following tip for you:

Make a Linux-Boot-Disk that start Minetest. Runs at every PC that can boot from external drives.
If your friends have all Windows, download the portable version of VirtualBox and install it there.

[rubenwardy]

Simply pick up a portable version here: http://www.minetest.net/downloads/

[Krock]

I sometimes played Minetest on a Win7 computer at school, using a flash drive.
Well, it took about 30s to join a world because it's a very slow drive - but apart from that it works perfectly.
The Minetest build I used was self-compiled, others from the download page would work too.

[Murkle]

Thank you all for your replies! I put the Minetest files on my flash drive and ran it on multiple PCs without any problems. I can now play my maps on different computers without having to transfer them, and I can share with my friends too! B-)

[BirgitLachner]

What about a portable Version for Linux?

Can it be possible to have a version that is running on my OpenSuse and a Debian-Version, too!?

[jan6]

What about a portable Version for Linux?

Can it be possible to have a version that is running on my OpenSuse and a Debian-Version, too!?

There is a fully portable version of 0.4.13(https://portablelinuxgames.org/game/minetest), I hope someone bothers to make an 0.4.14 version soon enough with same or similar methods... (http://appimage.org/ and https://github.com/RazZziel/PortableLinuxGames may help)
also, it's possible to compile with run_in_place option so you can place it anywhere, but that needs dependecies installed in order to run(i think) and I'm not sure if, and how well it'll run on machines other than the one it's compiled on

[Calinou]

What about a portable Version for Linux?

Can it be possible to have a version that is running on my OpenSuse and a Debian-Version, too!?

There is a fully portable version of 0.4.13(https://portablelinuxgames.org/game/minetest), I hope someone bothers to make an 0.4.14 version soon enough with same or similar methods... (http://appimage.org/ and https://github.com/RazZziel/PortableLinuxGames may help)
also, it's possible to compile with run_in_place option so you can place it anywhere, but that needs dependecies installed in order to run(i think) and I'm not sure if, and how well it'll run on machines other than the one it's compiled on

I began working on an AppImage for the latest Minetest Git (I could make one for 0.4.14 as well), but it currently does not run outside of the chroot it's being built in (Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit).

[est31]

I've made a flatpak build script for minetest. Using it one can create a build that works for all distros that support flatpak. https://github.com/est31/minetest-flatpak

[twoelk]

maybe this project could be reactivated: request for Minetest for PortableApps on Windows

One of the main problems was that you could not change all paths per minetest.config but would have to recompile as the relevant paths are hard coded. For example you can not take any build and decide per some configuration setting wether it works run_in_place or as system wide installation.

Imagine for example a usb stick with some worlds, texturepacks, games and mods in a common folder system while the executables reside in a parallel folder system, so that you could have a linux executable and a windows minetest.exe that both use the same common resources. Just walking from a windows pc to a linux machine and keep playing on the same local world.

The "PortableApps" file system needed something like that so that updating the minetest program did not touch the user created content. The solution Napiophelios came up with did some moving around of folders on start and back which wasn't ideal. Minetest should offer simpler ways of making this possible.