Closed
Bug 226848
Opened 21 years ago
Closed 2 months ago
Iomega USB drive distribution program
Categories
(Marketing :: Business Development, task, P3)
Tracking
(Not tracked)
RESOLVED
INACTIVE
People
(Reporter: chofmann, Assigned: rebron)
References
Details
Attachments
(1 file)
2.69 KB,
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Details |
I bought an Iomega USB drive last night ($40 for 128MB with rebate at fry's -- get'em while their hot) and notice they have a very interesting offering.. A special installation of Open Office is available that you can download, install on, and run off the USB diskdrive. We should figure out a contact at Iomega and see what is needed to get in this program as another distribution mechanism. Several folks at COMDEX commented on how they run Mozilla in just this way and pack along all their browser and mail settings and data, and can plug the USB drive into any computer anywhere and have access to all their data for browsing and mail data and preferences anytime, anywhere. Asa also has done some fiddling with this to get mozilla up and running on a USB drive I think.. We ought to think about what it would take to package something together and make a pitch to Iomega, or just offer it a general purpose offering/option that could work with any USB drive from any manufacture. More info on the Iomega program at http://www.iomega-activedisk.com/landing.jsp What is Active Disk™? Iomega® Active Disk™ allows your software applications to run everywhere you do. Stay mobile and organized with Active Disk Powered titles that live on, launch and run directly from your Iomega Mini USB drive. Insert the disk, and your application launches automatically. When finished, simply eject, and everything is saved to your secure Iomega Mini USB drive. Portable, easy, and secure - and it won't clutter your hard drive. download Active Disk titles Active Disk enabled OpenOffice.org1.1.0 It's here, it's portable and one of the more popular Active Disk enabled Open Source titles available. OpenOffice.org1.1.0 has been Active Disk enabled. This is not a trial or shareware version which expires in 30 days. OpenOffice.org1.1.0 is licensed under GNU and GPL licenses, which means it is readily available for your use as soon as you download and install it. Ever wanted take your business/personal productivity suite with you wherever you go? Tired of working on somebody's elses computer that has different personal options setup in their spreadsheet, word processor, HTML editor, or presentation application? Well, look no further, with Active Disk enabled OpenOffice.org, you can take all four applications with you on your Iomega disk or drive. (Works great on Iomega Mini USB 2.0 drives.) Run your OpenOffice.org suite at home, work or play with Active Disk enabled OpenOffice.org1.1.0. Download your Active Disk enabled OpenOffice.org1.1.0 today!!! (Not suggested for use on 128mb or smaller capacity media or drives.) Download Active Disk enabled OpenOffice.org1.1.0 Active Disk enabled Preclick Photo Organizer Preclick is the world's easiest and fastest way to find and organize your digital photos on your Iomega Mini USB drive. In addition to the fastest find, sort, slideshow, editing and email tools, Preclick offers Kodak prints at great prices. It's free and the only photo software you will ever need.. Preclick with Active Disk support can reside on a Zip disk, Mini USB drive or any other type of removable media making it easy to share your digital photo collection with your friends and family. Download Active Disk enabled Preclick Photo Organizer Active Disk enabled PocoMail Portable Edition PocoMail Portable Edition will allow you take your mail anywhere with you, but more importantly, it will keep it safe. All the mail is stored on the removable media, so no traces of it are left on the computer when you are finished. It's quick as no install and uninstall is necessary. And it's more powerful than webmail while at the same time giving you more protection - if you have to login to your webmail account your password may be captured by the computer browser or potentially key-logging software that silently monitors keyboard input. PocoMail Portable Edition stores your encrypted password (optional) on the removable media, so you will never have to enter it on a potentially unfriendly computer, for example in a cybercafe. Download Active Disk enabled PocoMail Portable Edition Active Disk enabled MusicMatch Jukebox MusicMatch Jukebox is an all-in-one digital music management software tool that includes a multiformat media player, an MP3 encoder, a CD ripper and burner, and an integrated online music service. Insert your MusicMatch Jukebox Active Disk and use all the features you have come to love. Remove the Disk or device and it all goes away and travels with you to you next stop. Go portable with the MusicMatch Jukebox Active Disk. Download Active Disk enabled MusicMatch Jukebox Mini Lock Software (PC 2000, ME and XP) Iomega® Mini Lock software gives you additional control over the data stored on your Iomega Mini USB drive. You can create a password protected secure area, called a Privacy Zone, on your Iomega Mini USB drive. download Mini Control Panel Software (PC 2000, ME and XP) Iomega® Mini Control Panel gives you all of the tools you need to readily view and manage the data on your Iomega Mini USB drive. You can customize your Iomega Mini USB drive to make it more personal and easy to use. download
Comment 1•21 years ago
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I think to do this for mail at least, we need to get rid of the absolute directory paths in our profiles. This means fixing 137006 for mail. Adding the dependency. Although the patch is probably too risky right now unless we really make a strong push for this. Also, isn't there an issue with these USB drives that you can only write to them so many times? They use Flash right? If your mail profile is on a USB device, we would be constantly writing to it as you read messages, reply to messages, etc. That's something to look into to.
Depends on: 137006
Reporter | ||
Comment 2•21 years ago
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I poked around on the iomega site for info about the number of times the device can be written to and wasn't able to find anything http://www.iomega.com/na/products/product_family.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=3037523&ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=63191&bmUID=1037288274744 there is a support number there and a developer program that we could sign up for to get more info. no bad comments about pocomail users running into write limitations, but the formum set up for that has little traffic..
Updated•21 years ago
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Priority: -- → P3
Reporter | ||
Comment 3•21 years ago
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I bought somemore UBS drives and I'm going though them to see if any have programs like Iomega. So far they seem to be the only with a program for software distribution talyored to the UBS drive. on a slightly related topic... when creating the next CD layout we should make that easily convertable to the smallest UBS drive dritro.. that would mean putting source tarballs under another directory tree... this list still consumes 184 MB's, but would allow installation of seamonkey,firebird, and thunderbird on just about any system... . ./mozilla ./mozilla/mozilla1.5 ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/README.txt ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/windows ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/windows/mozilla-installer.exe ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/MPL-1.1.txt ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/README ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/config.ini ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/installer.ini ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/mozilla-installer ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/mozilla-installer-bin ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi/browser.xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi/chatzilla.xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi/deflenus.xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi/inspector.xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi/langenus.xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi/mail.xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi/psm.xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi/regus.xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi/spellcheck.xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi/talkback.xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi/venkman.xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/linux/xpi/xpcom.xpi ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/MacOSX ./mozilla/mozilla1.5/MacOSX/mozilla-mac-MachO.dmg ./mozilla/technology preview ./mozilla/technology preview/firebird ./mozilla/technology preview/firebird/windows ./mozilla/technology preview/firebird/windows/MozillaFirebird-win32-0.7.zip ./mozilla/technology preview/firebird/linux-gtk2-xft ./mozilla/technology preview/firebird/linux-gtk2-xft/MozillaFirebird-i686-linux-gtk2+xft-0.7.tar.gz ./mozilla/technology preview/firebird/linux ./mozilla/technology preview/firebird/linux/MozillaFirebird-i686-pc-linux-gnu-0.7.tar.gz ./mozilla/technology preview/firebird/MacOSX ./mozilla/technology preview/firebird/MacOSX/Firebird-mac-0.7.dmg ./mozilla/technology preview/thunderbird ./mozilla/technology preview/thunderbird/windows ./mozilla/technology preview/thunderbird/windows/thunderbird-win32-0.3.zip ./mozilla/technology preview/thunderbird/linux ./mozilla/technology preview/thunderbird/linux/thunderbird-i686-pc-linux-gnu-0.3.tar.bz2 ./mozilla/technology preview/thunderbird/MacOSX ./mozilla/technology preview/thunderbird/MacOSX/thunderbird-macosx-0.3.dmg ./manifest
Comment 4•21 years ago
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cc'ing david so he can read the bug
Comment 5•21 years ago
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OK, here's word from Iomega: -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Iomega Active Disk Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 23:53:48 -0700 From: Jeff Rifleman <Rifleman@iomega.com> To: <bart@mozilla.org> Hello Bart, My name is Jeff Rifleman. I manage the iomega-activedisk.com site and have reviewed your input: "Hi there, I coordinate marketing and business affairs for the Mozilla Foundation. We'd love to work with Iomega to distribute Mozilla products in much the same way that you currently distribute OpenOffice. Can you provide me with a name and contact information for the appropriate person to discuss this with? Thanks, Bart Decrem 650-387-0625 bart@mozilla.org" The OpenOffice.org application that is available for download from our site is Active Disk enabled. In other words, a user can run the application from Iomega media without installing the application on the host computer. A user inserts an Iomega device and the application launches. Active Disk handles all the registry settings. When the user quits the registry settings are reset and no trace of the application is left on the host computer. This makes applications truly portable. We have had alot of interest in the OpenOffice.org application and it is one of the top download from our site. An independent developer submitted OpenOffice.org to our site after Active Disk enabling the software title. Currently, the Active Disk enabled title is only available as a download through the iomega-activedisk.com site. Mozilla applications also would make exellent Active Disk titles. Web browsing and email apps are very personal and users would love to have them portable. These would be exciting to have on our site as for our users to download and use as portable applications. I would suggest that you invite a couple of your lead developers sign up on the developer site and make it a project to Active Disk enable Firebird and Thunderbird for Windows. I would be more than happy to host the final titles on our site. If you need assistance with how to enable these apps, or would like a 'fast track' to have them enabled, we have outside resources that could help also. Just let me know. Feel free to pass this information along to your developers. To sign up as a developer and download the SDK: http://developer.iomega-activedisk.com Thanks for your reply, Jeff Rifleman Web Producer e-Business Group Iomega Corporation www.iomega.com rifleman@iomega.com
Comment 6•21 years ago
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I've made this bug public. If anyone feels it should be private, feel free to mark is marketing-private again.
Group: Marketing Private
Comment 7•21 years ago
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There are really two scenarios to focus on here: 1) I want to store my profile on a USB device where the drive letter can change. But the app sits on my hard drive 2) I want a USB installation of a mozilla app including bits and profile data. I'll focus on work for this second issue. Here's what I think needs to happen after brainstorming with Asa yesterday. 1) Modify mozregistry.dat to handle relative paths to profiles when possible. You can't always do this because some users pick a path on a different drive from mozregistry.dat, so you could not be relative to that. 2) When the app starts up, have it look for a mozregistry.dat relative to it's current location and use it if it finds one. Otherwise, fall back to the default documents and settings location. This is needed in order to make it easy to plug the usb device into another machine and when launching the app have us detect the profiles by finding this version of mozregistry.dat. This assumes that you had folders setup like the following on the USB device: f:\Mozilla\Thunderbird f:\Mozilla\Thunderbird Profiles\mozregistry.dat f:\Mozilla\Thunderbird Profiles\<salted profile directories> repeat for firebird/seamonkey/etc. 3) As an added bonus, this scheme would make it possible to just copy this stuff around between say your desktop and your laptop. Just grab the top level folder, drag it and you are up and running. Gee, sounds like an OSX app. I think David had some ideas which may be simpler than this. I'll let him chime in.
Please indicate bug numbers for these issues (e.g. mozregistry.dat)
Comment 9•21 years ago
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I heard from pch that the *bird apps were heading towards single-profile. I would encourage that (while keeping some of the profile-migration code). It would make this bug *much* easier to solve (and would remove the icky dependency on mozregistry.dat). At that point, the aviary would probably not need any registry settings at all to run from a zipdrive.
Comment 10•21 years ago
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bsmedberg: unforunately that's a false rumor. Thunderbird will always support multiple profiles. But your right, that sure would make things easier.
Comment 11•21 years ago
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mscott: you can still support multiple profiles with a single-profile build; you just can't use the profile-picker UI or do profile-switching. What I was thinking of doing is a separate little application to do profile selection before starting the main application. The advantage of the single-profile build scenario is that we can put compreg/xpti/chrome cache into the profile.
Comment 12•20 years ago
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Any news on this? I would like to see this as a portable application. the .dat file is not a problem. The Active Disk developer kit allows the moving of this file to the user's system, then removal of it on end.
Comment 13•20 years ago
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Mozilla, browser only, installs to a USB drive for me just fine, and launches after installation. However, after removing the USB drive, rebooting the machine, and reinserting the drive I am unable to start mozilla. No output at all from either starting it in GUI or from a command line. The drive letter has not changed, so that isnt the problem. I am unsure what else might cause this, but I thought this information could be relevant to the discussion.
Comment 14•20 years ago
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i'm presuming you're on windows, in which case i'd ask for logs from: filemon, regmon, and depends (there's a doc about dependency walker on www.mozilla.org), a single zip w/ .log, .log, .dwi would be fine.
Reporter | ||
Comment 15•20 years ago
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asa, any updates from your resent research on how one company seems to be doing this?
Comment 16•20 years ago
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I couldn't see what they were up to. Basically, they wrote a launcher app that sits in front of Mozilla and handles all the profile location business. I'm happy to do more investigation but I'm not sure how much I'll be able to discover or where to start, really.
Comment 17•20 years ago
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Perhaps it's a separate bug, but see also this: <http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/pollett/masters/Semesters/Spring04/Yun/index.shtml?CS297Proposal.shtml> She must be shy or busy, because I haven't had an email response after waiting some little time. The lecturer's responsive, though. Note also the convenient geographic area and timeframe. I think she's got a day job and reads yahoo mail rarely. - N.
Assignee | ||
Comment 18•20 years ago
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new contact: Tamra Hamblin Web Operations Manager Iomega Corporation 801-332-3592 office 801-332-4290 fax Working with her as she steps in for Jeff.
Assignee: bart → rebron
Comment 19•20 years ago
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Not sure if anyone is still interested in this bug or not, but Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird pretty much fits the bill for the desired functionality. It would just need to be packaged up in an Active Disk installer/executable. http://portablefirefox.mozdev.org/ http://portablethunderbird.mozdev.org/ If this is from a Business Development prospective, I was under the impression that the Active Disk technologies had been receiving far less interest as cheap USB thumbdrives from multiple manufacturers have supplanted Iomega's ZIP disk in the marketplace (what Active Disk was originally developed for).
Comment 20•20 years ago
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I don't know the logistics of such a thing but how about a dedicated USB drive for fire fox and even Thunderbird the attachment is a very rough jpeg of what it could look like. I had envisaged it made of the plastic that cheap toys are made from and quite cylindrcle, allbeit very shallow, but with the top slightly 3Dimentional inkeeping with the Fire Fox logo. The Thunderbird logo could be on the other side. I hope you see what I mean. At first I thought if it was cheap enough to produce they could go in cereal boxes as a free gift like other toys but I'm pretty sure this is a step too far. Correct me if i'm wrong.
Comment 21•19 years ago
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(In reply to comment #20) I do think it is a little too far.
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Updated•2 months ago
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Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 2 months ago
Resolution: --- → INACTIVE
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