Who wouldn't want a MUD on a thumdrive they can run from any computer!?!
Dare asked me about running tbaMUD on a thumb drive. I had never tried this so I did a bit of research and did not find a simple linux solution. There are a few websites that offer ubuntu desktop like penlinux.com but the ubuntu server install failed. I thought about VMWare, but I didn't want a complex solution so I fell back on my old faithful Cygwin.
The instructions are simple. Just go to
www.cygwin.com
and run their setup.exe. Install from Internet, choose your thumbdrive as the installation directory, leave default package directiory, leave default direct connection, and choose a mirror. When you get to the "select packages" section you do have to expand the devel group and add: "gcc-core C compiler" the "make: the GNU version of the make utility" and "subversion: a version control system" To add a package just click where it says "skip" and it will change to the current version number available.
You can rerun setup.exe at any time to add other packages like patchutils, etc.
Now open cygwin.bat from the thumbdrive, change directory to you thumbdrive (cd f: for me) and checkout the latest tbamud:
svn checkout
tbamud.com/svn/circlemud/circlemud
tbamud
(alternatively you can just download and uncompress tbamud-#.tgz from tbamud.com)
Checkout takes a while once complete:
cd tbamud
./configure
(wait for it, once complete)
cd src
make (q then enter to dismiss the license, wait for it again, once complete)
cd ..
bin/circle
Then point your MUD client of choice to localhost port 4000.
That is it. I was a bit disappointed with the speed. I haven't compiled a MUD that slowly in a decade, but it may just be my ancient thumbdrive. It is a sacrifice to be expected for portability.
Total time required: 2 hours (can you do better?)
It used 422MB on my 2GB thumb drive.
Please post in the comments below of your success, failures, and install time from thumb drive insert to tbaMUD login.
