I’ve just read Installing Ubuntu to an external USB drive – A Howto. In one of the comments I read:

My dream: a live-hd, a Linux installed in a external hard drive with the ability to recognize the hardware during the boot process – just like a live-cd…

That gave me a nice idea…

The idea is very simple. Create a new GNU/Linux distribution very very small, even smaller then DSL. The distribution should have a 2.6.x kernel, X.org, a very light window manager, and all the libraries and files needed to install VMware Player (VMplayer), so also GCC and the kernel headers are needed to compile the VMware kernel modules.

The GNU/Linux distribution should probe for the hardware each time is loaded, like a live distribution. Once loaded a user could run VMplayer and on top of it could run any kind of operating system without the need to reconfigure the hardware when booting from a different computer.

Naturally the distribution should be able to boot from USB drive (not a problem), and VMplayer should be downloaded and installed just by running a script.

Also another kind of distribution could be created. A live cdrom distro capable of running in RAM, so that the cdrom could be expelled. In this case the ISO file ready for burning can’t be provided, because of the VMplayer licese. But also in this case all should be downloaded and installed from the Internet just running a script. The script should download the distribution, download VMplayer, chroot in the distribution directory, install VMplayer, remove the software not needed anymore (such as the GCC) files, and create the ISO file.

This last approach maybe is better then the first one but you must carry not only the USB drive but also a compact disk.