[tex-live] relocatable texlive?

[Michel Goossens]

Hello,

I tried to generate a texlive tree on a portable USB-connectable hard disk on a Linux system. At first sight everything seems to be relocatable, but when I mounted my portable disk on Windows under cygwin xetex did not find any truetype or opentype directories. I "grepped" all files in the texmf trees, and found one file, texmf-var/fonts/conf/texlive-fontconfig.conf,
which has explicit absolute filenames to list the font directories. Its contents is shown below.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
  <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
  <fontconfig>
  <dir>/media/usbdisk/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype</dir>
<dir>/media/usbdisk/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/fonts/truetype</dir>
<dir>/media/usbdisk/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/fonts/type1</dir>
</fontconfig>rectories 

This prefix /media/usbdisk is the one the system assigns on my Linux fedora-based OS. On windows, the disk is mounted on the  E: disk (or /cygdrive/e/). I wonder, why in the texlive-fontconfig.conf file the directory names are not relative to the root of the texlive setup (texlive/2010 in this case?) as are all the other files that contain file lists (e.g., ls-R). 

When I mount my portable disk on my windows PC, open a cygwin command shell adding /cygdrive/e/texlive/2010/bin/win32 to the PATH (the same behaviour happens in a "cmd" command prompt window) and then try and execute xe(la)tex, it does not seem to find any of the truetype and Opentype fonts that are found on the same disk on Linux. Do I have to "prepare" my windows setup running tl-portable.bat as explained on the install-tl page the first time I try and use the new texlive on every Windows machine? I n fact, when I run tl-portable, I get the following:
 
$ /cygdrive/e/texlive/2010/tl-portable
Testing whether /cygdrive/e/texlive/2010 is writable...
/cygdrive/e/texlive/2010 is writable.
Using /cygdrive/e/texlive/2010 for generated files.
Platform unsupported 

Thanks for your help, mg