Many of you have been asking "where can I host my LivePCs"? Today we have an answer — we are looking for a few pilot users to try out our own LivePC hosting service. If you have a LivePC that you'd like to share and are interested in joining this pilot, let us know by e-mailing [email protected]. Space in the pilot program is limited and will be first come, first serve. All hosting and bandwidth during the pilot is free!

VMworld, the annual conference on virtualization, will be held in Los Angeles, California, next week. A few of us will be there, including our CEO, Monica Lam. We will be at booth 827, so stop by and say hi.

Another BIG reason for you to stop by is we are going to have drawings to give out USB Hamsters. Connect this hamster to your computer and the faster you type, the faster it runs. If you want one of these, write down an idea of a LivePC on your business card and we will pick the lucky winners at the end of each day. This is a video of our little pet at the office.

I would like thank all the people who participated in our LivePC creation webinar. I hope you get all the information you need to create your LivePC. If you still have any questions, please feel free to post it on our forum. For the people who missed it, we will post the webinar soon.

By the way, we can now post video on our blog (Thanks Andy).
Here is a short clip of Ardi, John and Gerald getting ready for the webinar.

You wish to build your own Windows LivePC, yet you don't want to go through the lengthy installation and configuration process. The 'xpfromcd' tool will help you easily create Windows LivePCs!

The 'xpfromcd' tool will be demonstrated in the live web seminar on Thursday, 10/26/2006, at 10am PDT. This tool asks you to insert a Windows CD, enter a few items, and the tool automatically creates your Windows LivePC for you -- it even installs firefox for you.

Download the tool now.

For more details about how to use this 'xpfromcd' tool, please refer to the web seminar or this quick steps page. The tool currently has some limitations, please give us feedback about this tool by commenting on the quick start page or posting to the forum.

We are going to have an online seminar to show you how to create a LivePC. Couple of our engineers will be there to answer all your questions. It's on this Thursday, 10/26/2006, at 10am PDT. You can sign up from here. Sign up now as space is limited.

The moka5 team would like to thank you for trying out our software and sending us feedbacks. Many of you have helped us found a few hard bugs that we would not be able to find ourselves. We are working really hard to get another release ready to address some of those issues. Our goal is to provide you the best quality software that you can trust. Keep those feedbacks and suggestions coming, we love to learn from you.

Thank you!

Following quickly on the heels of last weeks' Beta 4 release, we have a new Beta 5 release of the moka5 LivePC Engine available for download now!

What changed in Beta 5?

• UI performance and stability has been improved. OpenGL video driver support is no longer required to run the LivePC Engine.
• We have fixed the LivePC starting issues that began appearing with Microsofts' Windows update on Tuesday.

Please give this release a try today by downloading and running the installer — it will safely upgrade an existing installation. We will push this out as an autoupdate for all users next week (this never happened for Beta 4 due to the Windows update issue).

Do you want to protect your privacy while browsing the web? Do you want to avoid being spied on? Do you want to send encrypted emails and instant messages anywhere you go? Do you want to be James Bond? Then you should check out our latest LivePC: Fearless Browser. Install it on your USB device and show it off to your friends.

A standard Windows installation can be pretty big - up to a gigabyte or more. About 80% of that is useless junk that you don't need, which just takes up disk space and makes your system run slower. This is especially true when you are building a LivePC - the environment is virtualized so most of the hardware drivers are unnecessary. The question is, how do you strip out the
bloat without breaking anything?

There are a couple of tools that will help put your Windows on a serious diet. We've used these at moka5 to build some truly tiny Windows LivePCs - just 38MiB for a basic Windows XP Pro installation! You can layer on the software you want and have a lean and mean, yet fully functional, Windows LivePC that you can fit on a small USB stick.

Update 2 (Oct 9th, 11:30pm PT): Beta 4 has been republished on the Get Started page. We found a work around for the installer problems and are working on a permanent fix in the next beta.

Update (5pm PT): we found some potential problems with the installer for Beta 4 and have removed it from the site for now. We'll let you know when it is ready to download again. Our apologies, but we want to make sure that the experience is as smooth as possible for you.

I wanted to begin by saying thanks to everyone who has downloaded the LivePC Engine and joined the discussion on our forum! We're working hard to get the software ready for an official 1.0 release, and it's great to know what features and bugs matter most to you!