Is there any way to install Tracks on a thumb/USB/flash drive?  If so, has anyone roughed out the steps that would be necessary?

I’m currently running Tracks on a web host, but some performance issues (withe the host) have got me thinking having a local install might be better.  I use a thumb drive on WinXP to transport files with me from home to work every day, so that seems like a logical place. 

Wheat

I think you can try to transport the db using the usb-drive which requires you to install tracks on all machines or you can try to get a complete tracks install on the usb-drive. Perhaps InstantRails can work there.

I found this:

http://ruby.about.com/od/resources/qt/portable_rails.htm

Might try it tomorrow.  Covers setting up Mongrel, Ruby/RAILS, and SQLite3. 

Wheat

nice. please let us know if you succeeded. Could be a nice story on our wiki!

I tested it today using InstantRails.  It worked, but startup time is really slow (using Mongrel) and performance isn’t any better than my web-based install. 

InstantRails has Apache/MySQL/PHP too.  So I’m going to see if I can tweak it to get better performance.  I’ve started a howto doc on setting it all up.  But, if I can iron out the performance kinks, I might do a distro of InstantRails + Tracks so all that people can just download, unzip, and copy it to a jumpdrive.  InstantRails + Tracks eats up most of a 1GB drive.  But I’m going to look for ways to trim it down.

So, the good news is it works!  I’ll do some more testing and report back. 

Wheat

did you also try out portabel rails? That sounded nice too

No, I haven’t tried that.  Maybe I’ll try that today and see if performance is better.  Thanks for reminding me of it.

Wheat