macOS Xcode on Flash Drive?

Esanders323 said:

Hi,

I'm a computer science student at a university and I'm interested in developing iphone apps. Unfortunately, I do not have the money to purchase a mac or any laptop/desktop at this time. My university does not have xcode on any mac and don't allow anything to be downloaded and installed on any computer. I'm curious to know if I can put xcode on a flash drive and put the flash drive in a mac in the library. Would that work? And could I begin developing apps without having to download anything onto a computer?

Thanks

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Xcode would have to be installed - then it would require you to download the latest SDKs and Doc sets.

Simple answer is no, unfortunately.

I've never tried it but I can't imagine why it wouldn't work.

Talk to your professors or your IT people and they'll almost certainly let you install Xcode.

On first launch, each version of Xcode wants to install a few files. One of them is a driver for iOS development (same as included with iTunes, but hey, it still wants to reinstall it). There might be other things too, and definitely the command line tools. If the systems are locked down, these would fail. I've never skipped the initial setup with each update, so I dunno what happens.

I find it strange that a university wouldn't want students to learn. Go convince somebody smart to let you install it.

gnurf said:

On first launch, each version of Xcode wants to install a few files. One of them is a driver for iOS development (same as included with iTunes, but hey, it still wants to reinstall it). There might be other things too, and definitely the command line tools. If the systems are locked down, these would fail. I've never skipped the initial setup with each update, so I dunno what happens.

I find it strange that a university wouldn't want students to learn. Go convince somebody smart to let you install it.

Click to expand...

Problem is that with Xcode installed on a machine, you can do just about anything you want on that machine.

With a hard drive, you can install the complete MacOS X, Xcode and all on that hard drive and boot from the hard drive. The drive inside the Mac would never be touched.

To the original poster: You can try what happens if you restart one of these machines and hold the alt/option key pressed while restarting. Are you given a choice which hard drive to boot from? (Of course there will be only one unless you plug in another drive).

Yeah, a whole different OS installation might work. There's a lot you'll need admin access to do all the time.