[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Running sugar at almost-native speeds in Windows

[Wade Brainerd]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 11:08 PM, Luke Faraone <luke at faraone.cc> wrote:
>>>> Virtualbox is Free and potentially similar.  Also, coLinux
>>>> requires Administrator privileges to run, so students on school computers
>>>> probably can't use it.[1]
>>> Don't VMs on Windows require admin privileges to install and/or run (I
>>> honestly don't know)?
>>
>> I presume that we can package up the emulator as just some .exe on a USB
>> stick, to be run without needing installation.
>
> VirtualBox and VMWare all need drivers in the Windows kernel, so you
> are limitted to amazingly slow quemu.

QEMU is plenty fast when you install the acceleration service.  What
it lacks is a simple installer.

> Finally, we cannot legally redistribute VMware and the interesting
> parts of VirtualBox like USB and rdesktop support.

We can redistribute VMware player as part of a Virtual Appliance.

But really, all we need to be doing is producing .vmdk files (virtual
disk images) for our SoaS snapshots.  These files can be loaded in any
of VMware, VirtualBox and Parallels, and can be used with QEMU after a
command line conversion step.

Once we have a stream of .vmdk files coming, we can move on to
creating Virtual Appliances or other easier to use solutions.

Check out http://dev.laptop.org/~wadeb/OLPC-XO-Software-8.2.0-Setup.exe
for an example of a QEMU-based installer for Windows.  This uses
OLPC's 8.2.0 release but could be easily retargeted at SoaS.

Cheers,
Wade