Introduction
Welcome! The DiskApp project is an attempt at a new method of deploying applications on Unix and Unix-like systems. The fundamental idea is that applications should be contained within a single file that is portable, easy to manage, and eliminates the need for "shortcut" icons so commonly used in Windows, GNOME, and KDE.
Implementation
The method used by this project to achieve this goal is to pack applications into mountable disk images. When executed, the desktop environment automatically mounts the image, configures the environment inside the image, then executes it in place. When the application is complete, the disk is unmounted by the desktop environment.
Currently, an Alpha prototype of the design is available. However, it has only been tested on Solaris. While it should work on systems like Linux with only minimal modifications, there are significant limits on the number of mounts and/or loopback devices that these systems support. These limitations make other Unix and Unix-like systems a poor target for the current state of this project. A more complex implementation through
FUSE could remedy the problem in the future.