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Hi All, I'm looking to create a Desktop VM for administering some webservers I'm in charge of. My goal is to have it light enough to move between machines and backup/download/upload easily (i.e well under 4.7Gb even after prolonged use). The only software I really need is a Nautilus or Thunar, a browser, ssh, sshfs and Python2.5 - With this in mind I have 2 questions... What Distro to use? I'm going to want to mount the servers filesystems with sshfs and so I don't want anything running in the background that will try and index them, write to them or otherwise touch them without my say so. This includes apps that go dropping crap like temp files and backup files on them wherever they go (I'm looking at you Gedit!!!). I don't want a load of other crap making the image file larger and pulling down endless updates every time I boot it, no games, no IM, no office suite etc. I know I could strip down and configure just about any distro to get this, I'm just looking for something that will get me close. What VM platform to use? I have been using Virtualbox and am generally very happy with it's speed however I'm a little concerned with the portablility of it's images. Has anyone got experience of moving vbox images between platforms and versions i.e. Linux to Windows to Mac, Newer to Older? Nice though snapshotting might be I don't plan to rely on it as it seems flaky, I'll just be using the disk image directly and backing it up regularly. Also, as an aside, anyone got any experience of running a VM from a truecrypt encrypted volume? All ideas, comments and suggestions warmly welcomed, thanks :-) Roger.