On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 11:08 PM, Luke Faraone <[email protected]> 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. 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 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!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
