We have a lot of cool toys here. This time we have a very nice looking encrypted USB memory stick from IronKey and we have used it to run LivePCs.

It provides military-grade encryption in a tamper-proof & water proof metal case. It has secure backup and password management. One of the most interesting feature is if someone tries to guess your password and if he/she gets it wrong ten times, the key will erase all the data and destroy itself!!

After a long hiatus, everyone at moka5 is very happy to announce the release of a new version of moka5 Engine for Bare Metal!

What is Bare Metal, you may ask? Bare Metal is a stripped-down version of Linux that boots directly into moka5 Engine. You can install it directly on a computer, creating a computing terminal for running your LivePCs.

I'm happy to announce a new release of moka5 Engine for Windows: Beta 17! This version has some great new features:

• Run as non-Administrator: You asked for it, you got it! In certain situations you can now run moka5 Engine from a limited-access guest account.
• Improved disk performance: Your LivePCs will now run even smoother, especially during heavy disk activity.
• USB hot-unplug support: moka5 Engine is now more tolerant of sudden disconnections when running from a USB device.
• VMPlayer 2.0 now bundled: moka5 Engine now comes bundled with the latest release of VMPlayer, which includes better support for Windows Vista and USB 2.0.

We have an iPhone in house and we are playing with it now. Too bad it cannot run as an external USB drive. Otherwise, we could run moka5 LivePC off it. Here are some pictures:




We will take some more better pictures and write a review after we spend more time with it.

I'm sitting at the SYS-CON Virtualization Conference in NYC, listening to the Keynote by Sun VP of Global Systems Engineering, Dr. Hal Stern. Dr. Stern is talking about the future of virtualization and service-oriented architectures (SOA). He described the move toward more dynamic architectures, with faster development cycles, more user-generated content, and increased leveraging of open source technologies.

I'll be attending the SYS-CON Virtualization Conference in New York on June 25-27 as a representative of moka5. If you track me down in New York and mention this blog post, I'll give you a free exclusive custom-made high-performance moka5 USB flash drive, valued at $29.95. This is probably the highest-performance 1GB USB drive available and is Vista ReadyBoost capable. I'll also be giving demos of the latest from moka5 and other swag. See you there!

Today's Distro of the Day is Fedora 7. Fedora is the free community version of Red Hat Linux. Fedora 7 is the latest and greatest of the Fedora Core series. It was just released June 1st and was published in the LivePC library by a community member by June 5th.

The codename for Fedora 7 is "Moonshine" and it features a new visual style called "Flying High". Indeed, many parts of the system like the default backgrounds and login screens include hot air balloons and other themed elements.

Today's Distro of the Day is Games Knoppix. Games Knoppix is a version of Knoppix that is preinstalled with a lot of games. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. There are literally hundreds of games preinstalled in this distribution for you to try out. The whole image weighs in at 2.7 GB, but luckily with the LivePC Engine it can just download the parts you need so you don't have to wait for the whole thing to finish downloading.

Today's Distro of the Day is One Laptop Per Child. The OLPC project is a nonprofit project out of the MIT Media Lab to distribute $100 laptops to children throughout the world. It is designed to be extremely low power and work in remote areas without power or network. The hope is that by supplying children with laptops, "children in emerging nations will be opened to both illimitable knowledge and to their own creative and problem-solving potential."

Today's Distro of the Day is Damn Small Linux 3.3. Damn Small Linux (DSL) was originally developed as an experiment to see how many usable desktop applications can fit inside a 50MB live CD. It was at first just a personal tool/toy. But over time Damn Small Linux grew into a community project with hundreds of development hours put into refinements including a fully automated remote and local application installation system and a very versatile backup and restore system which may be used with any writable media including a hard drive, a floppy drive, or a USB device.