VMware Virtual Machine Development Enviroment for XBMC Linux porting effort

I've created a VMware Virtual Machine for anyone interested in helping with the Linux port. It is based upon Ubuntu 7.0.4 Desktop, and all the pre-requesite software is installed (as is KDevelop). Performance isn't great, and there's certainly no 3d support, but it should work good enough to get a lot of tasks done without having to install Ubuntu yourself.

You'll need VMware Workstation or the FREE VMware Player to run the image. The VMware player can be downloaded at http://www.vmware.com for free.

The userid/password is: xbmc/xbmc

You can get a copy of the VM from http://www.aceshome.com/xbmcdev.zip

Great idea. Thank you!

Very nice, thanks!, I can't believe we did not think of that before we announced it
...I hope you don't mind that I added information about and a link to it in the WIKI?

PS! Are there more tools, scripts, etc. which could make it even better/accessible?

Not a problem.

There's already a script in the xbmc home directory to pull the code from subversion.

It might make sense to setup a graphical subversion client.

I thought about putting a copy of the T3CH distro on there and scripts to copy in newly built executables and shared libraries, but thought I'd check demand first.

Enabling Accelerated 3-D for a Virtual Machine
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
=> To enable a virtual machine for accelerated 3-D

1. Choose a virtual machine with Windows 2000 or XP guest operating system.

Note: Do not enable Direct3D on a virtual machine that is powered on or suspended.

2. Add the following to the configuration (.vmx) file for the virtual machine:

mks.enable3d = TRUE

This line enables accelerated 3-D on the host. It is required to support accelerated 3-D in the guest and also enables the host to accelerate 2-D portions of the guest display.

3. You may also add one or both of the following optional lines:

svga.vramSize = 67108864

This line increases the amount of VRAM on the virtual display card to 64 MB. Adding more VRAM helps to reduce thrashing in the guest. The maximum value is 128 MB.

vmmouse.present = FALSE

This line disables the absolute pointing device in the guest. Applications which require DirectInput relative mode need to turn off the absolute pointing device in the guest. In practice, this is only required for a certain class of full screen 3-D applications (for example, real-time games like first-person shooters).

Note: If you set the vmmouse.present option, you should also turn off the preference for motion ungrabbing in the Input tab of the Preferences settings dialog.


To turn off ungrabbing for vmouse.present:

a. Choose Edit > Preferences.
b. Click Input.
c. Deselect Ungrab when cursor leaves window.

I haven't tried enabling 3d support on a Linux guest, but I'll give it a try and see what happens.

The above works fine on winxp guests. I don't think it's been implemented for opengl on linux guests though, but let us know how it goes.

I did have a weird pointer issue with winxp (it would disappear in a text box) but playing with the input preferences seemed to fix that issue.

Cheers,
Jonathan

tssgery,
Why do you say performance is not great? Do you mean the VM or XBMC within the VM?

I built an Ubunto 7.0.4 desktop VM last week and it is very snappy. I run Wks6.0 on a C2D E6300 & 2GB RAM on WinXP.

I run a TON of stuff on VMware and actually looking to build an VMware ESX Server at the house to run my home automation and media center and a bunch of other things. I do this stuff for a living... fun sometimes, but darn pricey!

I'd LOVE if the XBMC Linux version ran smooth as butter in a VM... this is the perfect world for me

And, Wks 6.0 have support for USB 2.0 so all those USB HD capture cards might even work if XBMC gets to the point where DVR or even video passthrough (so everything is in a single interface) works.

Affini Wrote:tssgery,
Why do you say performance is not great? Do you mean the VM or XBMC within the VM?

I built an Ubunto 7.0.4 desktop VM last week and it is very snappy. I run Wks6.0 on a C2D E6300 & 2GB RAM on WinXP.

I run a TON of stuff on VMware and actually looking to build an VMware ESX Server at the house to run my home automation and media center and a bunch of other things. I do this stuff for a living... fun sometimes, but darn pricey!

I'd LOVE if the XBMC Linux version ran smooth as butter in a VM... this is the perfect world for me

And, Wks 6.0 have support for USB 2.0 so all those USB HD capture cards might even work if XBMC gets to the point where DVR or even video passthrough (so everything is in a single interface) works.

I mean the VM.

I say performance isn't great simply because it's not as fast as running it on physical hardware. If you have a nice machine, and it looks like you do from the specs, it'll run great. I have an old Athlon 3000 with 1GB of ram that I turned into an ESX Server, and it runs 'ok'. If people can devote better hardware that I can, performance will likely prove to be quite sufficient.

I utilize VMware in my job quite a bit, and have found it fantastic for developers/QA to use. Please don't let my statement about performance deter anyone from trying this VM. As I said, it's certainly good enough to get a lot of the porting work done.

If you want to improve performance with the VM that I built, modify the configuration to devote 1GB of RAM (only 512MB is currently assigned). That'll help significantly.

Affini Wrote:Why do you say performance is not great? Do you mean the VM or XBMC within the VM?

The Linux operating-system is not the issue, it is the XBMC software; performance in the XBMC GUI is only poor under a VM because of the lack of 3D hardware acceleration, (the reason for this is that XBMC GUI uses 3D hardware acceleration to render and accelerate eveything in XBMC is showing on the display, the lack of hardware acceleration support will show itself as very low frames-per-second rendering and slow GUI responseness). So while 3D hardware acceleration is not required for developers to help code XBMC, but 3D hardware acceleration will be a future requirement for XBMC end-users once XBMC for Linux is mature.