Portable/Thumb drive Klayout?

edited December 2013 in General

Does anybody have experience running KLayout from a thumb drive? The cleanroom I work at from time to time has their own favorite layout software, which makes me shudder in comparison to KLayout. It would be great to throw a couple of versions of KLayout on my thumbdrive, so that I could run it from Windows or Linux computers. I'm guessing that the Windows binaries supplied in the download .zip might work (?), but what about Linux?

Is there any other interest in a 'portable' build aimed at putting directly on a thumbdrive?

... which brings me to my second question. Matthias - how is this project supported? The support you offer through this forum puts some commercial shops to shame. Any thoughts on adding a 'donate' button to your page? I'd gladly contribute something. Every time I come back to KLayout's page to look something up, I'm dreading a notice saying that KLayout is now closed, and comes with a hefty license (RIP 'LayoutEditor').

-Michael

Comments

  • edited November -1

    Hi Michael,

    thank you .. that is almost too much praise :-)

    I'll let you know when I'm in need for a donation. Right now I don't have plans to close anything and I'm not the one who holds users to ransom like saying "donate or I won't continue". My company is gracious and provides me with a daytime job I can live on plus have some time left to take care of my follow users.

    License wise KLayout is GPL and GPL cannot be retracted. Just pull a copy and you can use that code as you wish as long as you comply with GPL. The main reason for me not to host a public project is that confidentiality is part of the deal. By now disclosing everything I can accept test data for example which I can promise to keep confidential. I welcome every contribution in the form of feedback, test cases, bug reports, documentation, add-on scripts etc. I also accept code contributions although it's often difficult to clarify the boundary conditions of integrating contributed code.

    Regarding your technical question: the Windows .zip find should contain all you need for Windows. Just unpack the .zip on your drive and double-click klayout.exe on the target system. You won't get the file associations however, but the program should start right away.

    On Linux it's typically more difficult although not impossible. If you happen to have a clone of your target system, you can build KLayout there and copy the binary to a thumb drive. If your target system comes with the associated libraries (Qt and possibly ruby) you're done. If not, you'll need to copy those to your drive as well and make sure their dependencies are resolved on the target as well (ldd is the tool which will tell you the libraries required). A wrapper script then is useful which sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to your drive before launching the KLayout binary.

    Best regards,

    Matthias

  • edited November -1

    Matthias,

    Sigh... I figured that it would be more difficult on Linux. I think that I'll try to get by without the thumbdrive Klayout for now, but it is nice to have the description of how to eventually do it.

    All I can say is thanks again for providing this wonderful tool!

    -Michael

Sign In or Register to comment.