[winswitch] [Spice-devel] Use spice to show individual X clients like xpra does?

[Alon Levy]

> 
> Hi
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I've played around a bit with xpra[1]. Xpra (AFAIK) starts an X server with
> > a
> > dummy video driver (or xvfb?) on the remote machine and a client xpra
> > process
> > on the local machine shows remote application windows just like they would
> > run
> > locally.
> > 
> > [1] http://xpra.org
> > 
> > Xpra also forwards sound, clipboard and microfon. So it seems to me that
> > there
> > is some overlap with spice.
> > 
> > It would be cool, if I could use spice in the same way, to see virtual
> > machine
> > X clients integrated in my local desktop just like local applications. Is
> > this
> > on your roadmap?
> 
> It would be really nice to have, but nobody is working on this afaik.
> 
> The current spice project is more designed toward driver level, rather than
> application level. You'd need to have a per-window drawing context in order
> to be able to display the seamless apps correctly. On Windows, it would
> probably need user-space gdi (&directx) hooks (somehow a bit like wine).
> Older methods just clip the remote windows with help of the window manager,
> however this is quite limited (see seamlessrdp or virtualbox seamless mode
> etc). I haven't looked at xpra, it would be interesting to see if and how
> they manage this per-window context. Perhaps it is possible to extend Xspice
> similarly? but I suppose it is rather done at higher level (application or X
> server frontend).

See http://xpra.org/trac/browser/xpra/trunk/src/README
I have to confess I used it some time in the past and completely forgot about it, thanks for bringing it up!
It is of course X specific, it uses Xvfb and becomes a compositing manager on top of it, and instead of compositing forwards the images to the remote X server, and also acts as a window manager deferring all app requests to the remote window manager on the client X. I haven't looked at the protocol, or copy paste support, or audio, which at this point Xspice supports. It should be easy to use the compositing manager + window manager bits (not sure about language). And teach the client of course to implement them too. Any takers?

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