RedNotebook portable

A user asked me if it was possible to create a standalone version of RedNotebook for Linux. At his job they only have Python 2.3 and no PyYAML and PyGTK. So I fiddled around a little bit with cx_freeze and found a way to produce  a portable RedNotebook version.

By the way, if you want to run the program in portable mode on Windows, just set portable=1 in the files/default.cfg file. Doing this, your journal will be saved in the installation directory instead of in the home directory. Setting this option could also be useful for the portable linux installations, but I haven’t tried that, yet.

I’ll layout the procedure for those who would like to also generate a portable version for Linux:

• For producing the portable version you need all of RedNotebook’s dependencies installed of course.
• You will need cx_freeze obviously
• Download the latest tar.gz source package and extract it
• Change into the main directory where you also find the README file
• For the translations run:
  • python setup.py i18n
• Run the following command on one line:
  • cxfreeze --include-path=.
--include-modules=rednotebook,cairo,pango,pangocairo,
gobject,atk,gio,gtk,gettext,glib,codecs,encodings.utf_8,encodings.ascii
rednotebook/rednotebook
• Copy the files/, i18n/ and images/ directories from rednotebook/ to the newly created dist/ directory
• Now you can run the program by double-clicking on the rednotebook executable in the dist/ directory
• Now you should be able to copy the dist/ dir to a different computer and run RedNotebook there

If you experience any troubles, please leave a comment.

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