Re: [Qemu-devel] Doing a Tcl/Tk based frontend

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 05:52:14PM -0500, John Morris wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-06-15 at 17:29, Oliver Gerlich wrote:
> 
> > If you are familiar with Tcl/Tk, maybe you could give some hints on how
> > to embed the Qemu window into such an app?
> 
> Embedding the emulator's window might not be the best way to attack the
> problem.  Especially since you would need to be able to detach it to be
> able to go full screen.  I have pondered the Tk frontend idea before so
> lemme dump my random thoughts on the subject and see how many holes get
> punched in em.

With the new VNC server capability there is no need to embed the emulator's
existing window. You can just have a GTK/QT widget which acts as a VNC client
taking the video feed & displaying directly within the GUI management app. 
Similarly you can redirect the QEMU monitor console to a UNIX pipe when 
lauching QEMU, so the management app can fully control the QEMU engine
to do suspend/resume, snapshots, media changesi.

I wrote an GUI app in Python which did the latter already:

http://people.redhat.com/berrange/olpc/sdk/olpc-qemu-admin-demo.html

At the time I wrote it there wasn't any VNC support in QEMU, so I couldn't
hook up the display, but with the 0.8.1 release it wouldn't be much effort
to embed the display directly in the app via VNC. So I don't think there 
are any changes required in QEMU itself to be able to create a fully
featured QEMU frontend easily on a par with VMWare Desktop, if not better.

Regards.
Dan.
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