| Unix Tools for Windows, No Installation Required |
| Posted on Thursday January 09, @11:46PM Pacific |
 Tradition installation programs must create directories, decompress program files, register ActiveX controls, install system DLLs, and set global environment variables. Each of these dependencies represents a possible point of failure, not just during install, but later after other applications are installed and uninstalled. Thinstall is an interesting technology that allows application suites to run in the packaged form with no required install or uninstall process. Thinstall makes a virtual file system visible to the packaged program allowing it to load and run directly from the compressed package. The application's read request are redirected so decompression from the package occurs on-the-fly directly into memory as needed. Programs can use DLLs, ActiveX controls, and even run bundled EXE files directly from the package without ever extracting them to disk. To demonstrate the power of Thinstall the company has produced Unix Tools, a collection of 18 of the most useful Cygwin tools packaged into a single 1.1MB (floppy sized) EXE file that runs without any installation process. Simply running the executable instantly creates a Unix environment for Windows without making any persistent changes to the underlying system. It includes bash, less, gzip, grep, find, df, du, ls, cat, cp, mv, ps, rmdir, mkdir, rm, pwd, and tar. Unix Tools is free, a cinch to install and very useful. Try it!
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