if you still remember that on my previous post, I was able to create a bootable ubuntu Hardy Heron on my usb flash drive. But, I just re-formatted my usb drive to experiment again on a different idea.

I was thinking if I could bring my personal projects on cakephp anywhere, in a flash drive and somehow, make it run on WAMP (since I have windows as my OS in the office and laptop.)

Initially, I thought a complete Apache+PHP+MySQL package like XAMPP would satisfy my need, but how do I make it run on USB? Then I found dtx-controller as the solution! dtx-controller will help you enough to make your xampp run on USB.

How to install and run XAMPP on USB? Here’s how I did it:

1. download and install XAMPP on USB drive.

2. download, unzip and copy dtx-controller files on to root folder of your XAMPP on USB drive.

3. This is just to test successful XAMPP installation on USB for the first time: run dtx-controller and you may either see the dtx control panel immediately, or it might be seen as minimized or loaded in the task bar. Note however, that you shouldn’t have other apache or softwares running /accessing / using the ports the same your XAMPP USB installation uses. If there are, you should terminate them and only your XAMPP USB installation should run.

4. terminate your dtx-controller , and rename your xampp folder to something else. This is to refresh current XAMPP USB installation. Also , take note which drive letter your USB drive is, or your XAMPP USB could misfunction, because of changing drive letters.

The readme.txt in your dtx-controller copy contains other instructions for you to change [a lot of] configuration to make your XAMPP run on USB.

Oh, I forgot to tell you, that I also added this line:

PHPIniDir “E:/xampp/php/”

this is to configure xampp to read my php.ini on xampp on usb. I did this because, when I tried phpinfo() on my XAMPP on USB, it said that the apache on xampp read my php.ini on my hard drive instead. I am not sure if you really need to do this too, but mine works better with this!

If you think there is something better, and you have a comment, please do so, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.