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Thinstall MS Word 2003 only 17.6 MB?

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electronixtar:
damn that's expensive  ;D

But what I want to know is how those portable apps are made. I might be able to manually do the task

mwb1100:
But what I want to know is how those portable apps are made. I might be able to manually do the task
-electronixtar (July 01, 2010, 05:41 AM)
--- End quote ---

How 'application virtualization' systems like Softricity works (and I think that Thinstall is similar) is by monitoring all file and registry access made by an application during a 'packaging' run.  The information is recorded, and when the application is run virtualized, those accesses are also monitored, but instead of recording the data, the virtualization layer provides it from what was recorded before.

Obviously there are a lot of details glossed over in that description - for example, not all file/registry accesses should be virtualized (like the file that you might open for editing when you're performing the packaging step).  I'd guess that the most difficult part of what those systems have to deal with are the exceptions to the rule.

However, one inexpensive piece of software that uses very similar technology and techniques is Sandboxie - I could see the author of that package possibly spinning off a thin-packager if he decided he wanted to branch off from his current market.  It might even be possible to take a sandbox and use it as some sort of 'thin' installation, but I don't think that Sandboxie itself is a portable app, so you'd just be pushing the portable aspect of the problem a little upstream.

steeladept:
Specifically, Thinstall (now Thinapp) is a very lightweight OS package.  On top of this is a virtual representation of the registry and other "critical" system files.  The application doesn't know any better, and installs as though it was a full (in this case) Windows installation.  Then when running, the virtualization layer translates all calls to the OS layer into a command to the actual machine it is plugged into/run on top of.  It captures the needed installer files like mwb1100 stated.  Why it is so small has to do primarily with which options were chosen at install time and what Word really needs (vs. the plethora of fonts, templates, etc that come with a regular install).

If you figure out a way to do this manually, I want to know how you did it. VMware starts with a 32MB customized Linux OS for their ESXi hypervisor, so to strip it out more than that should prove impressive.  Thinstall (before VMware bought them) created their own OS from the ground up for this purpose.  That said, if you can do something with the Xen Hypervisor (ESXi is proprietary), you might be able to do something like it - but I doubt it will be THAT small.

electronixtar:
Thanks for the explanations, guys.

I know how basic virtualization works, but what I am really interested is specifically how could one strip MS Word down to that small with no obvious function loss.

Today I found another software ripped, this time it's Photoshop CS5, it's only 37MB. And those exe/dll's were not compressed with things like UPX. Total files un-rared takes about 100MB disk space.

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