Second Life Portable

I’m a big fan of portable apps if for no other reason than is messes with many a librarian’s head when I show them that I can plug in my flash drive and run my software on their “locked down” computer. And, with the recent acquisition of a 4GB jump drive, I’ve got a lot of room to play. So, when I saw these instructions from Brett Bixler of The Pennsylvania State University on how to make Second Life run off a jump drive and leave no trace on the local hard drive (though admitedly, it does use the C: drive while Second Life is running, it just deletes the files when you exit,) I had to try it out. Yes folks, it works. Second Life does run a little slower than usual since jump drives aren’t as fast as hard drives but it did function reasonably and might be a solution for those wishing to run Second Life on public computers.

For some time I’ve been looking for a way to run SL off a Flash drive. This will enable students at Penn State using public labs to run SL, keep up with the frequent updates, etc.

I finally have a batch file (for the PC) that seems to do the job.

I installed SL on a Flash drive.

I created this batch script. A batch script is just a text file, so you can copy this script into any editor and save it as RunSL.bat:


: This script will launch Second Life.
: When SL is closed, it will delete temp
: directories that cause PSU Lab problems.
: For this script to work, the folder
: containing the Second Life application
: (SecondLife) must be in the same directory
: as this script.

@ECHO OFF
ECHO Please leave this window open.
ECHO IGNORE ANY "Profile Storage Space" MESSAGES YOU SEE!
ECHO Now launching Second Life...
ECHO.
PAUSE
CD /d %~dp0
CD SecondLife
START /wait SecondLife.exe
RMDIR /q /s "%APPDATA%\SecondLife"
ECHO.
ECHO Second Life is closing. Now cleaning up your temp files...
ECHO.
PAUSE
CLS
EXIT


Student directions:

The batch script named RunSL.bat will launch Second Life when you launch it. When SL is closed, it will delete the SecondLife temp directory that is stored on the C: drive in the Documents and Settings folder. This will keep the PSU labs at UP from forcing the user to manually delete these files, as the user’s file storage space quota is exceeded when Second Life runs. Second Life runs fine without these temp files.

For this script to work, the folder containing the Second Life application (SecondLife) must be in the same directory as this script. You cannot change the name of the Second Life folder, or the names of anything inside the Second Life folder.

If you are running this off a Flash drive, install Second Life (download the software from http://secondlife.com) directly onto the Flash drive (~70MB), copy this script onto the Flash drive in the same directory, and run this script to launch Second Life.

The Second Life application is frequently updated, and most of these updates are mandatory. If you launch Second Life and must update it, please follow the directions Second Life provides. Make sure you have enough free space on your Flash drive (~100MB) to perform a successfull update.