[Spice-devel] Using a SPICe guest from console

[Jonathon Jongsma]

On Mon, 2018-10-01 at 14:10 +0200, Enrico Mioso wrote:
> Hello SPICE community! :)
> 
> First of all, I would like to say thank to you for your work in
> SPICE: I find it to be a great idea.
> 
> I am writing to you to ask for help, since I am trying to use SPICE
> in a little strange way.
> I would like, for confort reasons, to be able to use SPICE-gtk to
> connect to a session where i am emulating a Windows guest, but
> directly from the console and withoutemploying a full-fledged X
> server.
> I am a blind user, thus I am using a screen reader inside the VM. I
> may just bring up an X server and somehow try to use spice-gtk inside
> of it, but I would like to know if there was a different way to do
> it, avoiding that.
> I tried to look around, I was thinking I could do this somehow with
> xvfb, but it seems it won't allow me to easily send keypresses, if
> not via xdotool. I would need to interact with the Windows guest as
> naturally as possible, even using strange combinations involving
> keypresses like
> capslock+n
> (keeping capslock pressed + n)
> to interact with the screen reader. Is it possible?
> In the past I used an USB keyboard, directly redirecting keypresses
> to the Windows machine, but I would like very much to be able to use
> SPICE, enjoying the big advantages.
> And I would like to be able to seamslessly interact with both the
> Guest and the real OS, as it is possible within a graphical
> environment. Using an X server would, in my opinion, slow me down on
> that sense.
> Maybe I am able to achieve that with a special X server config, that
> would stop the X server from interacting with the graphical hardware
> but still intercept keypresses?
> 
> Thank you very very much, and sorry for the disturbance.
> I also sent a mail to you Hans, sorry for the duplicate sending.
> 
> Enrico
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I'm afraid that I don't really understand the use case or why X will
not work for you. Non-standard setups are unlikely to work well without
a lot of effort on your behalf and the spice developers are generally
focused on common use cases and are not likely to have the time or
expertise to provide much help for your custom configuration. Good
luck.

Jonathon