[Live-demo] VMWare remote access (Solved?)

[Hamish]

Cameron wrote:
> Good news to hear you have VMWare working. I'd given up on
> VMWare and have been trying the Ubuntu defaut VM technology,
> KVM/Qemu (but am having issues with that, in that it seems
> to run so slowly I haven't been able to build an image).
> Hamish, have you had more luck?

I have xubuntu 10.04 running well in a kvm VM (& from the official live .iso).
Seems near real-time except for when dragging windows around the desktop,
but I'm running this from down the hall with X tunneled over ssh so that's
not too surprising.

This is on Debian/stable with newer KVM packages installed from
backports.org, everything else is standard. Your CPU needs to be a newer
flavour with hardware virtualization support, and that has to be enabled
in the BIOS.

# need this to keep mouse from getting stuck
export SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0

# how I start it, matching -cpu to reality is probably gratuitous

   kvm -hda ~/VMs/livedisc.img -m 1024 -cpu phenom


I tried with "-smp 2" but it got stuck so I stick to 1 core.
setting memory to at least 512mb with the -m option is fairly important.


I can scp out of the VM to the IP of the host to pull in files. I can't
ssh into the VM from the host, but I did read on the OLPC FAQ wiki some
trick to do that. In the VM you reassign ssh to port 2222 or something,
then some other localhost trick, and then you can ssh to localhost port
2222 from the host into the VM. I think I added the URL to this method
in our how-to-build wiki page.  Once you have sshd set up on the VM
perhaps you can log into it remotely via port 2222 to a terminal prompt
(the `screen` program is wonderful) and run stuff from there. That would
have the bonus of being able to do it without Xfce running, so we'd be
able to edit the user's desktop settings in a script instead of by hand.


scp from the VM to the host was slower than I expected, but it's still
pretty fast.
I can't cut and paste from my normal desktop into the VM window, but I
didn't try very hard to solve that. apparently there are tools.


well, that's pretty much all I know about it. I'll be dragged away by
other responsibilities for the next few weeks, not sure if I'll even
make it to emails. so the best I can do is wish good luck!  :^)


regards,
Hamish