[Sugar-devel] VMWare?

[Luke Faraone]

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 <http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/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 <http://www.mokafive.com/solutions/player.php> which has a
solution to make VMware portable.

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