Experiment with virtualisation of Debian in Windows environment
Mentor: SteffenMoeller (or someone else jumping in)
Summary: Prepare a DVD featuring Debian for Windows for which users do not need to know about Debian but only see the application(s)
Required skills:
- good reading and writing skills
- strong interest in both Windows and Debian
Description: The idea developed while strolling through one of those larger shops selling software for quite some money that would also be available freely on Debian. When we now put about everything into some cloud environment, why should then not the virtualisation be acceptable on the local desktop and the folks run Debian. The challenge is to allow Debian's applications to be started directly from the DVD while being executed by qemu or VirtualBox on Windows. This would require
- VirtualBox/qemu+Xserver to be installed if not installed already.
- The instruction of the virtualisation mechanism to start a particular application
VirtualBox is doing an excellent job to integrate the virtualised application with the local desktop. To get this all to perform smoothly for novice users would reveal many hurdles. I had no immediate idea how to achieve that "runs upon click on application from Windows" with qemu. VirtualBox might come to rescue with its shared folder for communication, but this cries for race conditions. More feasible seems the VirtualBox guestcontrol that apparently allows to execute any command on a particular image. Should this project turn out to be too easy (I do not think so) then I suggest to add to do the same also for MacOS X. With many applications now being available for many different platforms already, the need for this project is not too pressing. But especially the smaller gems of our distribution might find a larger fan base through this effort.
Applicants:
- Nigi
- Ganesh