CDE: Automatically create portable Linux applications - 0 views
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1. Quickly share prototype software CDE allows you to quickly share prototype software with friends and colleagues without making them install or configure anything. You don't need to figure out how to make a robust one-click installer; just run your program with CDE and send them the resulting package! The screenshot on the right shows me running a CDE package sent to me by a Ph.D. student at Rice University working on robot motion planning algorithms research. When I run the package on my 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10 machine, it launches a GUI with an OpenGL 3D virtual terrain map. I can tweak parameters in the GUI to explore the effects of different motion planners and also load alternate map and robot files. Without CDE, I would have needed to download, compile, and install half a dozen dependencies (which each have their own dependencies!) before I could run this research prototype. I would be much less likely to play around with it if I had to first go through all that hassle. Using CDE, you can simply put a self-contained package of your prototype software on a USB flash drive and demo it on anybody's Linux machine
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CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, and Environment required to execute a Linux command on another computer without any installation or configuration. A command can range from something as simple as a command-line utility to a sophisticated GUI application with 3D graphics. The only requirement is that the other computer have the same hardware architecture (e.g., x86) and major kernel version (e.g., 2.6.X) as yours. CDE allows you to easily run programs without the dependency hell that inevitably occurs when attempting to install software or libraries. CDE is easy to use: Simply prepend any Linux command (or series of commands) with cde, and CDE will execute that command, monitor its actions, and automatically copy all files it accesses (e.g., executables, libraries, plug-ins, scripts, configuration/data files) into a package within your current directory. Now you can transfer the CDE package to another computer and run that exact same command without installing anything. In short, if you can run a set of Linux commands on your computer, then CDE enables others to run it on theirs.
