[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] VMWare?

[Wade Brainerd]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Luke Faraone <luke at faraone.cc> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 10:55 AM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> VMware Player is available free for PC.  I'm not sure if it's free on
>> Mac and Linux.
>
> It is not, AFACIT, free on Mac; the server version is free on Linux but is
> too complicated for most people.
>
>>
>> I'm not advocating that we standardize on a single solution.  Some
>> deployments will already be using VMs and we should be able to easily
>> provide VM images which work with any of VMware, Parallels, or
>> VirtualBox.  www.jumpbox.com is a good example of a company doing
>> this.
>
>
> I've discussed it a bit in #sugar, and have decided to start a new project,
> SoaS-emu, with the goal of producing one-click installers for SoaS on
> workstations. For various reasons I've decided to use VirtualBox, mostly
> becuase of our ability to modify it without infringing on licenses. Soas-emu
> will, after the install has finished, have installed VirtualBox, the SoaS
> virtual disk image, and registered SoaS with VirtualBox. I'm also going to
> add a shortcut to the desktop which starts up a new window with the VM
> running inside it.
>
> Since VirutalBox has Guest Additions that are GPL (they provide non-GPL
> binaries), we can distrubute those preinstalled as well. These allow the VM
> network access, Rdesktop intergration, and seemless pointer movement (no
> need to "lock").
>
> As the SoaS build process is tweaked to produce VDIs (VirtualBox' prefered
> format), we'll also continue to produce VMWare VMDK appliances as well as
> raw ext3 images which can be used in QEMU, but I believe it is vitally
> important that there is a simple, point-and-click solution to the issue of
> demoing or trying out sugar which does not require configuring an emulator
> or mucking around with writing images to flash drives and the BIOS.
>
> I'm also in contact with Sun (who owns VirtualBox) and a third party company
> called MokaFive which has a solution to make VMware portable.

Awesome, sounds like a great approach!  Can't wait to see it up and running.

I totally agree that we should have a one-click installer in addition
to the VMDK and raw ext3 images.

-Wade