Stephen Harris wrote:
Winzip the C:\Aspell directory. Put it on the J: device. I am assuming that this is a USB drive that plugs into the back of a non-admin computer at another location. Copy the C:\Aspell zip file from the J: device over to the C: drive,
Note that this step isn't necessary, assuming a standard unzip utility like WinZip or Info-Zip's unzip is available; they'll all unzip from one drive to another.
> C:\> md Aspell ; and unzip the contents
into C:\Aspell. I don't think that takes admin rights. I have a non-admin username to test such things and makedir works for him.
Well, it depends on the machine, though in practice it may be that on the typical Windows installation, non-administrative users have write access to c:\.
In truth, the concept of "administrative" and "non-administrative" users on (NT-family) Windows is a myth of convenience. By default Windows does have an "Administrator" user and a "System Administrators" group; the former is assigned a bunch of privileges that aren't granted to ordinary users, and the latter has inheritable full-control access rights to the roots of all filesystems, when they're created. (I'm assuming NTFS.) But this is just a convention, though it's a convention that comes "out of the box". You can remove privileges from Administrator, and create restricted ACEs for System Administrators on any filesystm object, including the root; and you can delete Administrator and System Administrators.
(Contrast that with traditional Unix, where UID 0 *does* have certain special permissions, such as DAC-override, irrevocably; though some Unix implementations add security mechanisms that restrict superuser capabilities.)
And Windows also has the "Power Users" group and similar out-of-the-box intermediate grades of user, between the unprivileged Guest and the essentially all-powerful System Administrators. These, too, are just collections of privileges and ACEs, and can be modified from one system to another.
So it could be that the scheme you propose would work on many Windows machines, but it might well fail for "locked-down" installations, or if the user's account has minimal privileges (for example, if they're using the standard Guest account).
What it really comes down to is whether the user's effective ACE for c:\ allows the "Create Folders" operation. On one XP machine I just checked, that's true for users in the Users group (ordinary users), but not true for Guest. I don't know if that's how XP comes out of the box, and if eg SP2 changes it.
But when all's said and done, there's nothing to be lost by putting the aspell directory on the flash drive and trying to copy it to c:\, or putting aspell and linkd on the flash drive and trying to create the reparse point. If it works, you have spell-checking; if it doesn't, you don't, but you haven't lost anything.
(Of course, really one of these days one of us should fix the aspell-execution code in the Windows LyX port. One of these days I hope to do some work on LyX myself, but as I don't use it in my job, I can't give it as high a priority as some of the other FOSS software I use.)
So my nonadmin user was able to use linkd and it does not appear that linkd requires admin rights like some of the dos commands. This worked on XP pro, I am not sure about XP home. Your idea appears cleaner/easier.
linkd, if it's available, appears to require the same permissions as actually creating the c:\aspell directory, so putting it on the flash drive might indeed be simpler. It also has the advantage that the c:\aspell virtual path will go away when the machine is rebooted or when explicitly deleted with linkd, so there's no permanent change to the target system.
-- Michael Wojcik
