Portability
Matsu was hosted on an older Compaq Armada E500 laptop, with a 11GB disk, and only 128MB of RAM, running Windows XP. Of lately, it was suffering a lot of downtime, either because the Apache server was crashing, or because it was losing connectivity with the wireless LAN. Being the lazy boy that I am 
, I wasn’t exactly in the mood of moving matsu from it’s failing abode, so I did something better – I virtualized it and moved into my P4! How? Easy!
- Go to www.vmware.com
- Download the beta VMWare converter
- Install it in the machine you want to virtualize
- Run it – it’s really easy, if you have any doubts about the process, google it
- Choose the destination folder on a networked or external storage drive
- After the process, move the created VM folder to the machine where you’re going to run the image
- Again, at www.vmware.com, download the VMWare player to install on the new machine
- Run your older computer inside your newer computer!! You can configure the virtual machine with it’s own separate IP address, so you don’t need to re-configure your router’s port forwarding settings and such.
It works – if you’re reading this, this is being run in a WAMP installation (Windows XP, Apache, MySQL, PHP) inside another computer running Windows XP. I’m planning, when I’m not feeling so lazy, to do a very light LAMP (same thing but with Linux) image to run matsu in, that is portable to any machine running Windows or Linux (and hopefully Mac OS some day). As a bonus, it’s running much faster virtualized like this than it was on it’s own (albeit slower) dedicated machine.
Hmm, 128MB Ram and Windows XP, you made the right choice! Btw. did you ever check how much it would cost to upgrade the memory. Compaq memory for older latops is notoriously expensive, once I asked a representative here in Portugal and it was over 400 euros for 64MB RAM! Better to go to Ebay or something.