Thanks for the information on OmniOS, Gary. Just looked at it and it seems that operations were suspended on April 21, 2017.
In the past, I can already use something like Hyper-V, Proxmox, and others to run a GUI application in a container and then remote into it with RDP and VNC, for example from another machine. My twist on the project is that I would like to use one of the IllumOS dialects such that I could have one of the zones/containers have an X-Server that would passthrough to the actual video hardware so that I could use a VNC viewer, for example, on the same system as the other containers that are running so that I could remote into them as needed all from a single system. I did not want to have one system for the running containers/zones and another for the remote viewer, if at all possible. Just some thoughts, though. Cheers, Lonnie On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Gary Gendel <[email protected]> wrote: > Lonnie, > > One distro that may work for you is OmniOS CE: https://www.omniosce.org/ > > Like SmartOS, it can run LX (Linux) zones and uses pkgsrc which provides > basic x-windows support from that. (I've run apps like xterm etc. from a > remote desktop). Unlike OpenIndiana, native desktop functionality is > limited. > > Gary > > > On 10/23/2017 12:35 PM, Lonnie Cumberland wrote: > > Thanks for responding to my inquiry about OpenIndiana. > > > > Basically, I really like the small footprint of SmartOS and its ability > to > > be a good hypervisor (Linux and Windows) but for a desktop project, I > > wanted to be able to have a minimal OS that basically just run the > > containers/zones and then have one of the containers have a X-Server such > > that the base OS does not have applications installed in it. Then the GUI > > zone could be passed through to the video driver thus all of the X-Server > > stuff is also in a container. > > > > This was an idea that I have been playing around with for some time as > was > > going to look into possibly using SmartOS, but it is really not set up > for > > this and which is where I started digging into Illumos and subsequently > > OpenIndiana to see if something like this might make a good starting > point > > for this work. > > > > Thanks again, > > Lonnie > > > > On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 12:00 PM, Alexander Pyhalov <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> On 10/23/17 06:21 PM, Lonnie Cumberland wrote: > >> > >>> Greetings All, > >>> > >>> I have recently been playing around a little with SmartOS for running > >>> containers and hypervizing VM's for which it seems to work pretty well, > >>> and > >>> wanted to also investigate the desktop side of things as well so I hope > >>> that someone on the list will answer a few rudimentary questions to > get me > >>> going with my OI explorations. > >>> > >>> I know that SmartOS can be a hypervisor to run the Linux, and Windows > OS's > >>> as VM's in zones, but I was wondering if OpenIndiana was able to > hypervize > >>> these OS's as well? > >>> > >> Yes, it can. illumos-kvm is not a part of illumos-gate, but is a > separate > >> codebase, developed mainly by Joyent. We compile and deliver it, but KVM > >> benefits from several system features (the one which comes to my mind is > >> VND), which are available in SmartOS, but not in other distributions > >> (AFAIK). OI can run KVM guests on modern Intel hardware, but SmartOS > can be > >> more efficient, for example, in network virtualization. > >> -- > >> Best regards, > >> Alexander Pyhalov, > >> system administrator of Southern Federal University IT department > >> > > _______________________________________________ > > openindiana-discuss mailing list > > [email protected] > > https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss > > > _______________________________________________ > openindiana-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss > _______________________________________________ openindiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
