[Live-demo] FOSS4G Workshop

[Hamish]

Daniel wrote:
> I guess, the Virtual Machine image will be the one installed on the
> workshop PC's, right? I think it's the best choice, but I found out,
> that the initial screen resolution is just 800x600 as far as I
> remember. It would be necessary to install the Virtual Box Guest
> Additions, which seem not to be installed by default. I thought it
> was the case in previous releases, but that might be wrong.
> 
> With 800x600 px screen resolution it's pretty hard to work. Do you
> think it will be possible to have the Virtual Box Guest Additions
> installed on the workshop PC's?

For what it's worth, on a Linux host running QEMU-KVM instead of
VirtualBox, for me the default screen resolution opens at 1024x768,
although I note that default size depends on what graphics chip I tell
the VM software to emulate/provide.

>From the main start menu if you go into the Preferences submenu there
is the non-obviously named ARandR program which lets you control the
resolution, multi-monitor setup, etc. In the Options menu there it
gives me the choice of about 30 different screen resolutions to choose
from, which resizes the VM window. I guess to match the native screen
and then press the key combo to make VirtualBox go full screen could
make it work without stretching pixels?

If you've got 8 or 16 gb usb sticks with the Live disc installed with
persistence, and the I/O needs for you workshop tutorials are not so
great, then booting from those means that everyone can take their
projects home with them and sit down at any computer on day 2, etc.
(note the standard batch of usb sticks are not going to have
persistence, they'd have to be remade from another live boot [takes
about 5-10 minutes]). Personally I find the gee-whiz factor of bootable
USBs to have a portable self-contained OS and working environment
pretty impressive, and most CPUs these days can handle the filesystem
compression overhead in the background without cutting into single
thread performance. Raw I/O writing to the USB sticks will be
comparatively slow though compared to native. (I/O from a VM is going
to be pretty poor too, just not as bad)

there are a number of options..


Hamish