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

[Dave Bauer]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

You need the VMware, VirtualBox, or Parallels specifc extensions and
drivers, so we really end up needing one image for each platform to make
this easy for people to use. Hackers can of course, always customize the
VMDK.

I just tried coverting the VirtualBox VDI and learned that Parallels can't
just load the image, it needs the VMware or VirtualBox VM configuration file
that goes with the VM to do the import.

I am sure its possible, but it's a little trickier than it looks.

Dave

>
> 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<http://dev.laptop.org/%7Ewadeb/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
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



-- 
Dave Bauer
dave at solutiongrove.com
http://www.solutiongrove.com
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