Implementing Portable Desktops: a New Option and Comparisons
Muthukaruppan Annamalai, Andrew D. Birrell, Dennis Fetterly · 2006
We consider the problem of using a wide variety of computers, dispersed geographically and with varied connectivity, while wanting to have each of them provide you with the same, personalized, desktop environment: operating system, customizations, applications and your documents. We describe the existing range of solutions available for this problem, and introduce and characterize the new “Desktop on a Keychain” system. We explain the tradeoffs that these various systems incur, and the ways in which we believe they are good and bad. Finally, we explore some of the security issues involved in using such systems.