[Spice-devel] [winswitch] Use spice to show individual X clients like xpra does?

[Alon Levy]

> On 10/09/13 01:16, Alon Levy wrote:
> >> Hi
> >>
> >> ----- Original Message -----
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> I've played around a bit with xpra[1]. Xpra (AFAIK) starts an X server
> >>> with
> >>> a
> >>> dummy video driver (or xvfb?) on the remote machine and a client xpra
> >>> process
> >>> on the local machine shows remote application windows just like they
> >>> would
> >>> run
> >>> locally.
> >>>
> >>> [1] http://xpra.org
> >>>
> >>> Xpra also forwards sound, clipboard and microfon. So it seems to me that
> >>> there
> >>> is some overlap with spice.
> >>>
> >>> It would be cool, if I could use spice in the same way, to see virtual
> >>> machine
> >>> X clients integrated in my local desktop just like local applications. Is
> >>> this
> >>> on your roadmap?
> >> It would be really nice to have, but nobody is working on this afaik.
> >>
> >> The current spice project is more designed toward driver level, rather
> >> than
> >> application level. You'd need to have a per-window drawing context in
> >> order
> >> to be able to display the seamless apps correctly. On Windows, it would
> >> probably need user-space gdi (&directx) hooks (somehow a bit like wine).
> >> Older methods just clip the remote windows with help of the window
> >> manager,
> >> however this is quite limited (see seamlessrdp or virtualbox seamless mode
> >> etc). I haven't looked at xpra, it would be interesting to see if and how
> >> they manage this per-window context. Perhaps it is possible to extend
> >> Xspice
> >> similarly? but I suppose it is rather done at higher level (application or
> >> X
> >> server frontend).
> > See http://xpra.org/trac/browser/xpra/trunk/src/README
> > I have to confess I used it some time in the past and completely forgot
> > about it, thanks for bringing it up!
> > It is of course X specific,
> Mostly yes, though the codebase no longer has any hard X11 dependencies
> for servers: the shadow mode works with MS Windows servers too for
> example (though at present it is no more than a cheap x0vncserver
> equivalent - just screen scraping).
> (and there are clients in python and Java for many platforms)
> >  it uses Xvfb and becomes a compositing manager on top of it, and instead
> >  of compositing forwards the images to the remote X server, and also acts
> >  as a window manager deferring all app requests to the remote window
> >  manager on the client X. I haven't looked at the protocol,
> The wire protocol is pretty simple, and supports bencoded data (or
> rencoded data which is much faster) with a very limited set of commands
> for mapping/moving windows, etc.
> I guess another feature that would be relevant to you would be
> notification forwarding, the rest is probably handled already.
> >  or copy paste support,
> Is fully supported on all client platforms, but is one way only for OSX
> clients at present.
> >  or audio,
> We use gstreamer to compress the audio, usually as mp3 via lame.
> >  which at this point Xspice supports. It should be easy to use the
> >  compositing manager + window manager bits (not sure about language).
> "Easy" is not the word I would have chosen here ;)
> But maybe spice makes it easier somehow?

You got me, I was using "easy" as in "easy to show but there isn't enough room in this email to include the proof". I mostly assumed I could take it as is, and would be left with introducing the protocol bits.

> 
> Antoine
> >  And teach the client of course to implement them too. Any takers?
> >
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