RoudyBob.NET

Found this one in the Solutions Exchange at VMworld 2006. LivePC from Moka5 makes it possible to carry around a virtual machine on a USB flash drive or other external disk and run them on any Windows XP Professional machine without installing any software on that host. You can create your own VMs or download one of many public VMs (called “LivePCs”) from the Moka5 BetaGarage.

The product (free for now!) works by installing an embedded version of VMware Player onto the USB flash drive when the software is installed and the USB storage configured to work with LivePC. In addition, some scripts and other components are installed to the USB storage device. Upon plugging it into a Windows XP Professional desktop, the autorun capabilities of Windows will automatically start LivePC from the USB device and then LivePC can leverage VMware Player to run a self-contained virtual machine from the USB flash drive or external disk.

You can create your own LivePCs by using their software or import existing VMware Workstation virtual machines. The BetaGarage component is a user-supported website which hosts a wide range of LivePCs based on open source or freely distributable software. In my testing, it worked well from a 4GB PNY Attache USB flash drive. I downloaded and ran both the fearless browser (linux + firefox) LIvePC as well as the Nostolgic (open DOS) LivePC. A nice touch is that you can download new VMs from BetaGarage directly from LivePC. The biggest drawback is the requirement for Windows XP Professional, the need to run as a local administrator on any host machine you want to run LivePC on and, based on my testing, the need to sometimes reboot the host after initializing LivePC the first time.

http://www.moka5.com/livepc