by Alec » Fri May 28, 2010 9:11 am
In a normal day's work, I use at least three PCs in different locations, and sometimes more. My colleagues and students have similar patterns of work. It's just the nature of my work (and hobbies!) that I can't keep all the relevant files and programs in a single fixed location, so I work mainly from memory sticks. I would very much like a truly portable version of GD.
However, since that isn't available, I've been trying to persuade GD at least to make a single index on the stick, and not clutter up the various hard disks with multiple copies of the same information (over 200 MB -- I use a lot of dictionaries), which need to be rescanned and updated every time I make a change, which is quite frequently.
(Students, of course, do not have Administrator rights to our general-access computers, so cannot use GD at all, unless we install it separately on all 2000+ machines, which isn't going to happen.)
I have had *partial* success with persuading GD to create its index in a different location, but only partial. In Windows Vista, GD usually creates its index in C:\Users\{myusername}\AppData\Roaming\GoldenDict . I used Symlink Creator to create a symbolic folder link called "index" in that location, and refer to where I'd prefer to keep the index, which is on the same USB stick that contains GD's home folder and my dictionaries. That worked: GD obediently created the index on the stick, and didn't clutter up the hard disk. However, I have been unable to persuade my XP and Windows 7 PCs to do the same trick; the "index" symlink simply doesn't appear, despite dialogue boxes reporting that it has been successfully created. If anyone knows how to do that, I would be very grateful for advice.
However, I'm not sure that even achieving that would make GD portable: would the index created by one PC be unrecognized by another? If so, I'd be no further forward.
Of course, I would be even more grateful for a portable version of GD, which would make all this hacking unnecessary, and would instantly make GD available to thousands of grateful students.
Alec.