[Spice-devel] Spice-Html5 Client Query

[Uri Lublin]

On 12/14/2016 08:05 PM, Shirley Arava wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was looking for some sort of guidance as to where I was going wrong
> with the spice protocol requirements. We are currently trying to use
> SPICE-html5 client to provide remote access to Virtual Machines hosted
> on a Xen hypervisor. It would be really helpful if you could provide us
> some inputs since we are currently improving the virtual private cloud
> experience for hosting online labs at Tandon School of Engineering, NYU.
>
> On my test bed, I have deployed an ubuntu server(16.04 LTS) as a virtual
> machine on a xen hypervisor(also ubuntu 16.04 LTS server) and was able
> to connect remotely to the virtual machine using the spice html5
> client(www.spice-space.org <http://www.spice-space.org/>). However I was
> unable to get the copy-paste functionality to work.
>
> According to a few of the documentations/blogs I have read, for the
> copy-paste functionality to work, spice protocol needs the qxl driver
> and spice-vdagent to be present on the both host and the guest machines.
> I have installed them on the xen server and the guests, but I was still
> not able to copy-paste.
>
> Can you help me figure out or point me to some good documentation to
> check if I have overlooked something to get SPICE-html5 client to run
> with the clipboard sharing.

Hi Shirley,

For clipboard sharing to work you need on the guest:
1. virtio-serial driver (and matching device for the VM)
2. spice-vdagent service and agent (and matching port for the VM)
(See Configuration in
  https://www.spice-space.org/spice-user-manual.html#agent)

No need to install it on the host/server.
No need to install it on the client machine.
No need for QXL device.

You do need a client that supports clipboard sharing.
It seems that spice-html5 does not yet support it.

In spice-html5 git repo, in TODO file, one can find:

   Explore clipboard
     - Supporting it may require unpleasant hacks


Can you try using remote-viewer ?

Regards,
     Uri.