[Qemu-devel] Re: Re: QEMU GUI-Frontend based on Libvert API

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

On Fri, 21 Jul 2006 15:58:41 -0400, Joe Lee wrote:

> Well, first let me say I am not a programmer and know very little about
> GUI development and their toolkits. But, I have been reading up and
> learning about what's out there. Having said that, I think "Virt-Manager"
> is built using GTK/Glade with Python and I am not quite sure if that would
> meet the requirements to having a cross-platform GUI for users. And,
> something that would offer a native look & feel to the OS platform they
> use.

I don't wish to start a flame war, but the idea of a "cross-platform GUI"
is somewhat of a myth.  If nothing else, VMware and Parallels are both
examples of having multiple interfaces optimized for all the platforms
they support.

> As mentioned in my previous email, for OpenSourceDemo.com, I'd like to
> make available a VM software product with a GUI that can be used by users
> using windows, linux, and mac-os. Therefore, I don't know if GTK/Glade is
> the best choice for this. If it is, using virt-manager would be great!

See above.
 
>> Basically, there's quite a bit of work to do in libvirt before you could
>> even start writing a GUI for QEMU.
> Hmm, really didn't know how much work would be involved. But, I think it
> would be good to start, if people like the idea of having a QEMU support
> for libVirt. I just think it would great to harrness and leverage the work
> behind libVirt and have support for QEMU. The GUI part would be easy to
> add on.

Supporting QEMU in libvirt has been on the libvirt TODO list for a while. 
There is quite a lot on the list though.  Feel free to send patches to
libvirt-devel though :-)

> Also, if it would take a long time to have support for QEMU using libvirt,
> I was wondering if anyone can help me come up with an interim solution to
> have a gui that I can make available on the site. Would greatly appreciate
> the help with this. Ideally, I am looking for a solution where the GUI can
> package QEMU with it. So, as a user installs the GUI on there PC it also
> installs QEMU in one install. This would remove the complexity of having
> to install QEMU and then the GUI. This is how I see most of the available
> GUI that exist work.

I posted some patches earlier to implement some of the basic support for
having a GUI bundled with QEMU.  Hopefully that's the first step.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Evan