Okay, I installed  JSPWiki on xampp on an SD card to have an isolated sandbox for JSPWiki.  The install was space intensive due to the number of small files added with Tomcat and JSPWiki.  The install was also not entirely portable, in that the only systems that could run the setup from the SD card were those that had J2EE 5.x or later installed–quite the high end requirement.

So I decided to install MediaWiki instead.

• Download the ZIP package from from the xampp for windows
• Open the xampp-win32-*.*.*.zip file that was just downloaded and extract to C: (change to flash drive drive letter here if necessary).
• Run [drive]:xamppxampp_start.exe to test starting up the web server and mysql.  Validate that browsing to your local machine brings up a served web page.  Depending on the speed of the media you’re using this may take 15 seconds or so after running xampp_start.exe

At this point, xampp should be ready to for installing MediaWiki.  (Shorter walkthrough here.)

• Download the latest version from the MediaWiki download page. (version 1.13.3 as of this writing)
• Use 7-zip to unpack the tar/gz file.
  • Right-click the media-wiki-1.13.3.tar.gz file and click 7-zip -> Open Archive
  • Single-click on the media-wiki-1.13.3.tar file and click the [Extract] button in the menubar.
  • You should have a media-wiki-1.13.3 folder in the same location as the zip file you downloaded.  Rename this to MediaWiki.
• Copy the MediaWiki folder to [drive]:xampphtdocs.  (Note:  You could also copy the contents of the folder to the htdocs directly, but then you would need to delete the index.* files and would also lose your links to phpMyAdmin, etc..)
• Browse to http://localhost/MediaWiki
  
• Click on the setup link on the page.
• Fill in
  • Wiki name
  • Admin username and password/password confirm
  • Probably want to disable e-mail options for this setup
  • Fill in a new database name, db username, and db password (this should be created for you because of the security setup with xampp)
  • Check “Use superuser account” (this will enable username/password and database creation)
  • Database table name prefix (I used the suggested “mw_”)
  • Click [Install MediaWiki]
• Move the config/LocalSettings.php file to the parent directory ([drive]:xampphtdocsMediaWiki), then follow this link to your wiki.

Some clean-up:

You may want to go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ click on Privileges and Edit both of the MySQL root accounts to have passwords.  There is a separate [Go] button under the “Change Password” section of the “Edit Privileges” page for this.

For my default installation of xampp with MediaWiki on a 2 GB drive:

• 6,827 files and 664 folders
• Size: 294 MB (309,291,225 bytes)
• Size on Disk: 311 MB (326,238,208 bytes)

Still quite a bit of space, but more efficient than the JSPWiki install on a FAT32 partition.