[Spice-devel] Using a SPICe guest from console

[Frediano Ziglio]

> 
> 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.

Not much familiar with screen reader. I suppose is a program inside the
VM that read what is inside the screen so even if Windows is always
in graphic mode you can understand what is on the screen. I also suppose
you ear the speech as audio so you are using the audio channel with SPICE
client but not the display channel (the video).
Or does the screen reader goes into a Braille device?

> 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?

What the advantages of running from a console instead from an X server?
Just to avoid some resource usages? Or is that you use console so for
instance you don't have to understand where the graphic server is focused
as is always in the console?
Sorry if my questions seems really base but really I don't understand
your usage.

> 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.

Which advantages would you like to use?

> 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?
> 

In the past I had a script that created dynamically Xorg configuration
in order to force different devices and start different programs.
I suppose you could redirect the video to a dummy device, redirect the
keyboard to the tty (the console) and run just spice-gtk full screen
on the Xorg.

> Thank you very very much, and sorry for the disturbance.
> I also sent a mail to you Hans, sorry for the duplicate sending.
> 
> Enrico

Ciao,
  Frediano