Introducing the MOA-Live CD

 

Virtual machines boot what ever ...

+         Live CDs boot where ever ...

Let's boot what ever - where ever ...

Select options with your mouse

This screenshot shows the start-screen of the MOA-Live CD.
You can translate MOA as "Multi-OS-Addicts" or "Multi-OS-Admin" - at the moment both variants are the same.
Let's have a look at the different sections:

 

Bart PE: this section starts with a BartPE build with 2k3 and integrated VMware Player.

Puppy Linux: this boots into Puppy Linux
BSD: boot into FTP-installations of OpenBSD, NetBSD or FreeBSD
Linux: boot into Tom's Rootfloppy
Exotic: boot into Reactos, Menuet-OS ...
System Rescue CD: GENTOO-based Linux - contains a free Partitionmagic-clone
GRML-mini CD: Knoppix-based text tools

Ultimate Boot CD: can't make a better collection - so let's integrate the UBCD
Commercial Tools: this section will boot into tools like Ghost or Partitionmagic

The MOA LiveCD will never be available as a full Download - you will have to built it yourself.

The main ingredient to the MOA LiveCD is the VMware Workstation.
At the moment I find it easier to build this based on Bart's PE.
Maybe on a future version I will also built based on Puppy Linux ...
I have already built some Plugins for Bart's PE - but I found that many
users had their problems to reproduce this on their own.
That is the reason why I now change to a more complete approach.
The first release of the MOA Live CD will come with a BartPE standalone-plugin.
You will only have to add your selection of drivers and your Windows-source CD
and a fresh download of Bart's PEbuilder.
As it is possible to have multiple BartPE-builts on one CD I plan to add more options like:
WS 4.5.2 , VMplayer ,WS 5.5 ...
All this variants can be added as a RAMloader-version as well.

MISSION-STATEMENT: Boot what ever -where ever

lets get started

VM-live

original size:

This is a screenshot that shows the current state of the WS5-plugin
You can see NT4, RedHat 6.2, NetBSD and Solaris running in a VM at the same time.
The 4 VMs are stored in a Firewire Traveldisk. The Solaris-VM puts a heavy-load on the system - but once it is up that settles down to an acceptable level. All 4 VMs use slightly more than 1GB RAM. At the time of this screenshot I used a RAMdrive of 256MB and a pagefile of 512MB on local drive C:\ - If I need more power I can use a "RAMfile" instead. The RAMfile - as I call it - is a virtual disk that I store somewhere on the local harddisks or on my Traveldisk - the location doesn't really matter. Without the 256MB for the usual RAMdrive I can think about loading BartPE into RAM - this kills the biggest bottleneck of this setup - the slow CD-drive.
The BartPE-build that you see on the screenshot is a slightly modified Reatogo XPE 1.0.3 with the extended RAMdisk-version. Sourcesystem is XP-sp2.
At the moment the setup of the virtual Nics has a minor bug - once that is resolved I'll post it here. The 2k3 version doesn't have this networking problems. Now it uses straight nu2menu and prompts for a cheatcode at startup.

If you enter for example 16gs the startup.bat extracts a prepartitioned virtual disk to C:\ and mounts it so that it transparently replaces the usual Ramdrive. This safes a lot of RAM - RAM that you can better use for your guests or to load BartPE into it.