Virtual XP delivered

I recently cleared out some gigabytes on my Windows XP desktop at work and installed Ubuntu Linux. Although remote desktop, Open Office, IE4Linux, WM codecs, and Evolution Exchange connector delivered an okay solution for Windows compatibility it wasn't quite good for all my legacy Windows apps and data.

For instance I was still missing the ability to play my Napster Windows DRM-ed files and some stuff in IE4Linux just didn't work. So after spending about a week getting my Ubuntu install just the way I wanted I decided to install VMWare Server. Then I installed Windows XP on a VMWare machine inside Ubuntu. Fortunately I had a license code kicking around from an ancient MSDN license I was the developer of record on (someone paid thousands for that so it was good to get some use out of it) and I was able to activate that so it would be permanently useful.

My plan is to take my XP virtual machine installation and physically move it around on a reasonably high speed USB flash drive - one that is about 4GB or so. Since they are know quite cheap, in the $100 range it seems like a good solution so long as the host machine has VMWare Server installed. If you're wondering how big a virtual XP image is, well my fresh install with nothing except Cisco VPN and all the latest updates installed is, when the C: drive was compressed, cleaned up and defragmented just at sweet 1.3GB. A lot more than a standard Linux install but small enough that it will easily fit on a 4GB drive and leave tons of room for extra apps like Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, Napster etc. plus data.

I've yet to figure out how VMWare snapshots will figure in this scheme - I reckon I can snapshot the nice clean machine and then only have to copy around the delta. Or, if I'm running off the flash drive itself (vs. copying to the local machine first) then it really doesn't matter. The snapshot will just provide a convenient roll back and backup point.