I hope my question fits superuser. I am a PhD student and I must use a software on my computer at the faculty's office but unfortunately, the informaticians are not at the university since a quite long time and I can not install the software myself because the computer requires an administrator password in order to install softwares.
Is there any way to open and use a software without installing it to the computer ? For example, installing the software on the USB key ? or another method ?
Any help highly appreciated.
34 Answers
Out there exists a lot of 3rd party applications that trace the installation of another software to create a portable version of the software that you want.
These kind of applications are commonly known as "install tracers", it basically monitors the filesystem and registry modifications to reproduce them in an automated way. This avoids the need of an installation procedure in other machines.
Note that obviously an installation of the software is need to be realized once to track what files the installer expands and what other things the installer does, but you can do this for example in a Virtual Machine.
I suggest you to use VMWare ThinApp because it's the most automated way I discovered.
VMware ThinApp is an agentless application virtualization solution that isolates applications from their underlying operating systems to eliminate application conflict and streamline delivery and management.
It is intuitive with a user-friendly GUI, and it comes with an offline user guide in pdf format which you also could see online in VMWare's website.
ThinApp is a paid product, however, with the trial mode I think you could do the task you require.
5Portable apps has a great selection of tools you can run without installing them. Of course since you didn't specify what software you need specifically you will have to check yourself.
On linux you could compile and run from e.g. your home dir without installing.
Short of hacking the machine for an admin password... the only option I see is trying to use a Live USB version of Linux (like an Ubuntu-loaded USB), and see if you can install and run your app from there.
Doing this often requires entering into the BIOS and making sure the boot process checks for bootable USB drives before running the hard drive's main OS. However, the BIOS might have a password on it, which then would make changing the boot order impossible.
Use a virtual machine to install software without installing in your local computer, virtual box by oracle is a decent choice. Get a portable version of the software if you don't want to have a vm.
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