Turn your iPod into a PC

USB2 is the key
Modern powerful PCs make the everyday use of virtualisation a practical proposition.

With high-speed USB2 interfaces, it’s now possible to run virtual machines and applications directly from a portable storage device, co-opting the processing power and hardware resources of the host PC.

USB1.1 devices may work with these applications, but we found in practice that they are too slow to be a practical solution.

Performance will never be as good as the ‘real’ thing, but all the programs in this feature were tested on a variety of USB2 memory sticks, ranging in size from 256MB to 2GB, attached to a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 HT ‘Northwood’ single-core PC with 2GB of Ram running Windows Vista, and they were all perfectly usable.

We wouldn’t recommend older PCs, though ­ at the very least you should have a processor that supports Hyperthreading ­ and the more Ram you have, the better.

So now let’s take a closer look at these applications, focussing on those that offer the full PC-in-your-pocket experience.

A PC in your pocket
PCW readers will be familiar with Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007, as we’ve often promoted this free tool as a great way to safely try out new operating systems and applications.

But it has its limitations ­ it doesn’t offer much support for non-Windows operating systems, although it will run some Linux distros. There’s also no support for USB or Direct3D in the virtual machines you create, so it’s no good for running 3D games or using locally connected USB devices.

Also you can’t carry around a self-contained virtual machine on a portable USB storage device ­ you can store the virtual images (in Microsoft’s VHD format) on any device, but to run them you’ll need a PC with Virtual PC installed. However, Virtual PC and its rivals are still very useful. We look at what’s available below.

The two main free applications we’re looking at, Mojopac and Moka5, both let you carry an entire Windows or Linux PC around on a USB device, which for Mojopac can be as small as 128MB, depending on storage needs.

Moka5
Moka5 is based on the free Vmware Player virtual PC application, which was created in 2005 by a team of PhDs from Stanford University in the US. It creates virtual machines (‘LivePCs’ in Moka5 parlance) and lets you publish them to your own web server or the Moka5 hosting site for downloading by other Moka5 users.

This means there’s a wonderful selection of pre-configured virtual machines for you to try out. Some of the more novel of these include a dedicated Quake 2 PC, a PC with a collection of retro text adventure games and a demo of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) operating system.

Moka5’s unique feature is the way that it ‘pushes’ updates to LivePCs via the internet. This system allows simple centralised management ­ each time Moka5 starts, it checks for new versions of the LivePCs you have installed and updates them as needed.

Only the changed parts of the LivePC image need to be downloaded, making it fairly quick after the first cached copy is made. You can use Moka5 offline as well, but in that case you won’t get any LivePC updates.

In the home, for instance, you could install Moka5 on all your PCs and create a LivePC running Windows and a set of applications that you want all your PCs to have. You can then configure Moka5 so that these LivePCs are reset to the clean image every time they’re powered on, neutralising any changes made to the system during each session.

This is a powerful way of keeping a pristine operating environment. Users’ data files can be stored separately, on a network share or a separate virtual hard disk that can be configured when you create a LivePC.