On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Luke Faraone <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 10:55 AM, Wade Brainerd <[email protected]> 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, 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 which has a solution to make VMware portable.
Awesome, sounds like a great approach! Can't wait to see it up and running. I totally agree that we should have a one-click installer in addition to the VMDK and raw ext3 images. -Wade _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
