Oh No, I’ve got no Mojo

Posted on September 27, 2006 2 Comments

Saw reference to a new product yesterday [via Download Squad] and was looking forward to trying it out this evening. The product is called MojoPac and, in theory, does some sort of magic to treat an external USB drive as another pseudo-virtual PC. Wait, I didn’t say that right. Here, from the Overview page:

MojoPac is a technology that transforms your iPod or other USB storage device into a portable and private PC. Just install MojoPac on any device with a USB port, upload your applications and files, modify your user settings and environment preferences, and take it with you everywhere.

Every time you plug your MojoPac-enabled device into any Windows XP PC, MojoPac automatically launches your environment on the host PC. Your communications, music, games, applications, and files are all local and accessible. And when you unplug the MojoPac device, no trace is left behind – your information is not cached on the host PC.

Conceptually, this is a pretty slick idea. In fact it could be a step above portable apps (which is slick too, don’t get me wrong). The ability to keep separate environments is attractive. Having a complete development environment on my 60GB external drive, installed and ready to go regardless of what PC I’m sitting in front of would be cool. Granted, there’s small print details like “it must be XP SP2 and you must have admin rights”. Ok, not small details, but I don’t do web cafes or college machines, so that’s not a huge deal (for me — based on some reading in the forums some folks are having strokes over it!). I just use a lot of machines and do happen to have admin rights on all of ‘em.

However, my test machine meets all requirements except for the fact that my boot drive is not letter “C:”. So alas, it won’t even try to run for me. Boo and hiss. Word from the forums is maybe a patch will be out later. Hopefully while there’s still a chance at the free trial.

Saw a comment about doing something similar with qemu/linux that would be interesting if my development tools ran in linux. Cool idea though.

Tags: linux, MojoPac, portable, portable-apps, qemu