Re: [VirtualGL-Users] VirtualGL windows and CATIA v5

[DRC <dco...@us...>]

Yes, this is the type of solution that The VirtualGL Project supports
now.  My understanding from his original message, however, was that he
already was running CATIA on a local Windows workstation and was looking
for a way to share the screen from that workstation.  Both are useful
for different reasons.  There are a lot of applications which don't
necessarily play into the server-side rendering model, because the data
they deal with is small enough that running on a laptop connected by 100
Mbps Ethernet is sufficient.  I have several friends in the SolidWorks
business, for instance, and their market is primarily small shops for
whom the overhead of putting in a 3D server would outweigh the benefit.
 However, a problem they do want to solve is how to collaborate with
other users.  I think that solving the problem of collaboration on 3D
Windows workstations is within the capabilities and scope of The
VirtualGL Project.

On 9/24/10 5:06 AM, joh...@br... wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Instead of running Catia v5 in Wine you can try this.
> 
> I work for a company developing ThinLinc (http://www.thinlinc.com) a
> thinclient solution based on opensource. We now have several costumers
> running Catia v5 inside Thinlinc + VirtualGL+ VirtualBox+ Win Xp guest
> 32bit or 64bit with good OpenGL performance, supporting multiple users
> per server .
> 
> It is also possible to shadow a ThinLinc session (share screen).
> 
> I recorded a shoppy video on my phone to demo the solution. Plays in
> VLC
> vlc http://www.cendio.com/~calmblad/IMG_0245.MOV
> 
> Requirements:
> Server HW: Intel based server, 64-bit CPU, Nvidia GPU (Nvidia Quadro
> card gives good performance), 2-4 GB RAM (to avoid disk-swapping...)
> OS: Fedora 13 64-bit or RedHat 64-bit
> SW: NVidia graphic driver, ThinLinc Server, VirtualGL, VirtualBox
> 3.2.8, Windows XP, ThinLinc Client SW
> 
> 1. Install Fedora 13 64-bit
> 2. Install Nvidia graphic Linux driver
> 3. Install VirtualGL 2.2 beta 1 64-bit rpm
> 4. Run /opt/VirtualGL/bin/vglserver_config
> 5. Follow the setuid steps from the VirtualGL manual
> http://www.virtualgl.org/vgldoc/2_2beta1/#setuid_linux
> 6. Download ThinLinc http://www.cendio.com/downloads/servercd/
> 7. Install ThinLinc, see ThinLinc Admin Guide
> http://www.cendio.com/resources/docs/tag/ch03s04.html
> 8. Download latest VirtualBox 3.2.8 http://www.virtualbox.org
> 9. Install VirtualBox 64-bit rpm
> 10. Create a Linux user called “catia”
> 11. Start VirtualBox with "catia" user (not root)
> 12. Install Windows XP guset, name it <winxp>
> 13. Install VirtualBox Guest additions
> 14. Enable 3D support in the VirtualBox GUI, also add 128 MB of GPU RAM
> 15. Install Catia v5 inside the Windows XP guest
> 16. Download Thinlinc clients here (Linux and Windows clients)
> http://www.cendio.com/downloads/clients/
> 17. Start the Thinlinc client on a Windows or Linux client
> 18. Logon to the ThinLinc server as the “catia” user
> 19. A Gnome desktop will appear
> 20. Start a terminal and execute vglrun VirtualBox --startvm winxp
> --fullscreen
> 21. Viola, you now have a OpenGL accelerated Virtual Windows XP 
> machine
> 22. Create a Linux user called “shadow”
> 23. As root execute 
> hivetool /thinlinc/vsmserver/allowed_shadowers=shadow
> 24. Keep the first catia user session running. Start a new ThinLinc
> client and click Options, check the “Enable  Shadowing” box
> 25. Logon as shadow user and type catia in the “User to shadow:” box
> 26. Now you are able to “Share the screen” between the ThinLinc clients
>  
> 
> Please give it a try and give us feedback. It will work with good
> performance!
> 
> You can tweak the system to autostart VirtualBox without running Gnome.
> 
> 
> It is also possible to create more Windows XP Virtual Guest running
> multiple users (Virtualbox processes) on the same ThinLinc server or a
> ThinLinc cluster with multiple ThinLinc Agents servers.
> http://www.cendio.com/resources/docs/tag/network.html#network_simple
> 
> //Johan
> 
> On Thu, 23 Sep 2010 22:50:56 +0200, Tihomir Plachkov
> <tih...@gm...> wrote:
>> Thank you for the tips and the quick responses. I will take my time to
>> investigate and test your recommendations.
>>
>> Greetings
>>
>> Tish
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 15:05 -0500, DRC wrote:
>>> WINE should fully work with VGL 2.1.4 and 2.2 beta.  If it doesn't, then
>>> please submit a bug report about any problems that are encountered with it.
>>>
>>> I've spent hundreds of hours over the past 6 years or so investigating
>>> Windows server solutions for VirtualGL.  The ideal approach would be
>>> something more like the VirtualGL/TurboVNC solution for Linux, whereby
>>> each user gets their own virtual desktop.  Windows Terminal Services
>>> takes care of the virtual desktop part, but there is no way to access
>>> the 3D accelerator from within the terminal services session.  RemoteFX,
>>> which is based on the Calista technology that Microsoft acquired, is
>>> supposed to change that, but I think it only works on Windows 7 and later.
>>>
>>> In terms of screen scrapers, the basic problem there is that
>>> hardware-accelerated 3D bypasses the GDI, and thus WinVNC and similar
>>> solutions (LiveMeeting, GoToMeeting, etc.) have no way of knowing when
>>> an OpenGL or Direct3D application has updated its window.  The idea we
>>> came up with a while back was to use the TurboVNC Server for Windows
>>> (which has its issues-- it really needs to be replaced with TigerVNC
>>> ASAP, but I need to fix some performance problems in TigerVNC's Windows
>>> server first.)  I wrote a rudimentary OpenGL interposer which redirects
>>> the rendering from the app into a Pbuffer but immediately reads back the
>>> pixels and draws them back into the appropriate app window.  This allows
>>> the pixels from hardware-accelerated 3D apps to be displayed in WinVNC,
>>> since the pixels are now going through the GDI.  The solution is grossly
>>> inefficient, because now the pixels are being read back from the
>>> graphics card and immediately sent back to the graphics card, then read
>>> back again for compression, but it at least offers a reasonable solution
>>> for doing collaboration.  Some of the inefficiency is removed by using a
>>> mirror display driver, since this stores a copy of the screen in memory,
>>> and thus the screen scraper doesn't have to go all the way to the
>>> graphics card to read back the pixels for compression.  The results of
>>> this research are in the winfaker/ subdirectory of the VirtualGL 2.2
>>> source.  The solution requires Microsoft Detours, and I don't think it
>>> is currently working with the latest nVidia drivers.  Finishing this
>>> solution is one of the hot topics for which I am seeking funding.
>>>
>>> On 9/23/10 8:14 AM, Dan Kegel wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 5:35 AM, Tihomir Plachkov
>>>> <tih...@gm...> wrote:
>>>>> I am primary looking for a collaboration
>>>>> tool which will help me share my screen and discuss with a distant user my
>>>>> work in CATIA.
>>>>>  My question is how can I adopt the VirtualGL project for my purposes under
>>>>> windows or some other means with additional linux machine?
>>>>
>>>> http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=16156
>>>> says Catia works in Wine.    Have you tried that?  If that works, then
>>>> check to see if it works with VirtualGL.  Good luck!
>>>> - Dan
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Nokia and AT&T present the 2010 Calling All Innovators-North America contest
>> Create new apps & games for the Nokia N8 for consumers in  U.S. and Canada
>> $10 million total in prizes - $4M cash, 500 devices, nearly $6M in marketing
>> Develop with Nokia Qt SDK, Web Runtime, or Java and Publish to Ovi Store 
>> http://p.sf.net/sfu/nokia-dev2dev
>> _______________________________________________
>> VirtualGL-Users mailing list
>> Vir...@li...
>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/virtualgl-users
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Nokia and AT&T present the 2010 Calling All Innovators-North America contest
> Create new apps & games for the Nokia N8 for consumers in  U.S. and Canada
> $10 million total in prizes - $4M cash, 500 devices, nearly $6M in marketing
> Develop with Nokia Qt SDK, Web Runtime, or Java and Publish to Ovi Store 
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/nokia-dev2dev
> _______________________________________________
> VirtualGL-Users mailing list
> Vir...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/virtualgl-users