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

[David Farning]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 5:21 AM, Sebastian Dziallas <sebastian at when.com> wrote:
> 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.

Maybe, you could get Sasche to set something to create automatic daily
builds on the Sugar Labs build farm:)

david

> Cheers,
> --Sebastian
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