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

[Sebastian Dziallas]

Wade Brainerd wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Dave Bauer <dave.bauer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Actually, you can create a .vmdk from .img using the QEMU tools.  It's
>>> just that .vmdk is much more widely supported that .img so it would
>>> save a conversion step for most VM users.
>>>
>>> I agree that we should be providing 1 click solutions *in addition* to
>>> providing .vmdk files for people who already use VMs regularly.
>> Right, VMDK is not easily reusable though, for Parallels you have to perform
>> a few steps to reuse it.
>>
>> One click solution is the goal of course. QEMU really isn't that solution
>> unless you can use acceleration. The speed is pretty much unusable
>> otherwise, and that is really only useful for testing if you are very
>> patient. Anyone who needs a 1-click installer also would expect reasonable
>> performance.
>>  I haven't found an easy way to get QEMU working with acceleration on OS X.
>> I think we are working towards a solution, just not as quickly as we would
>> like.
>>
>> Dave
> 
> I brought up VMware Virtual Appliances as an option at one point, has
> anyone tried creating one of those?  I'm not sure how close to "one
> click" they are though.
> 
> VirtualBox appears to have the beginnings of some appliance support as well.
> 
> Best,
> Wade

Okay folks,

sorry for the late reply, as I just came across this thread (I was a bit 
behind my e-mail). So let me explain some things:

There are the appliance-tools (www.thincrust.net) available which do in 
fact exactly the thing which has been discussed here. You can even 
specify a output file type, so that you'd get vmdk, raw or other files.

Sounds cool, heh? :)

Well, what I've done now is that I've taken our kickstart files and made 
one for the appliance creation up out of them. It's also in the soas GIT 
repo. Then I worked on getting appliance-tools to work on our build 
systems (thanks erikos here!) and it now creates flawlessly such a .vmdk 
file.

I already gave it a try and it boots, but doesn't come up with the Sugar 
desktop, but fails when trying to log in.

A good idea would be probably to have these images built together with 
the other snapshots.

Cheers,
--Sebastian