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

[Luke Faraone]

On 3/10/09, Benjamin M. Schwartz <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
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> Sascha Silbe wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 09:26:59PM -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
>>
>>> So, the principal difficulty with using coLinux with Sugar is that it
>>> uses
>>> a Windows-side X server, which provides its own window manager.  We need
>>> to use our own, custom-configured window manager, in order for the GUI to
>>> work.  (For the same reason, Sugar won't run over an ssh tunnel.)
>> Can't say anything about the first part, but the second is plain wrong
>> (the box running Sugar shipped by lenny is in a different room - go
>> figure how I prevent having to move my feet :) ). The window manager
>> isn't tied to the X server in any way.
>
> Are you using the "sugar-emulator" command?  I believe this command runs
> sugar inside a Xephyr box, which creates a  complete new virtual X server.
>  This X server runs on the "client"-side, i.e. your Lenny box, with its
> own window manager, in this case Matchbox. Your "server"-side X server
> never interacts with Sugar directly.
>
> This approach should also work with coLinux.  However, it has significant
> overhead (running multiple X servers will do that), and I'm not sure that
> it would allow the user to run in full-screen mode (as Sugar is designed
> to run).  Ideally, the user would be able to resize the Sugar window as
> they please, including switching to and from full-screen.  I know that
> VMWare Player supports this; I haven't tested anything else.
I'm not sure that what you are saying about sugar-emulator is correct;
the xepher xserver is runing on the box you are sshing into with the
output displayed on your own box.

X11 is fully ported to Windows, and supports full-screen. Simply add a
runtime argument and it will behave as you desire with only one
xserver client and server.

>>> 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.

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

-- 
Luke Faraone
http://luke.faraone.cc