Developing on a VM

Using Cinder
1

Hi all,

I have an upcoming project that I’d like to use Linux for, but don’t have direct access to a dev machine that runs Linux. I was thinking about attempting to do this using a VM through something like VirtualBox. Anyone tried this before? Anyone for or vehemently against this idea?

Thanks!

2

I haven’t particularly used cinder on a virtual machine, but from my experience it would be impossible to have full access to your GPU - basically that would mean one GPU is serving two machines at the same time.

3

I have successfully built Cinder apps on a Windows virtual machine with VMWare Fusion as it natively supports OpenGL 3.3 and DirectX 10.

Parallels only supports OpenGL 3.2 (or at least did when I first tried) which is too low for Cinder 0.9 apps to run.

I’m also interested in learning some Cinder for Linux, this post from the old forum seems to have a lot of answers if you havent seen it already.

https://forum.libcinder.org/topic/cinder-for-linux-gcc-5-x-ubuntu-15-10-and-vmware

4

Hey,

VirtualBox last time I checked didn’t properly support Core Profile so the VMWare route should be the safest/easiest to follow - Instructions to do so are provided here and I believe that should still be relevant.

For me developing on a VM would only make sense for smaller scale projects that do not require extensive use of resources and/or fancy GPU side magic. Of course this would also depend on the actual host hardware you are gonna run the VM on, but in any case you are running a ( virtual ) computer inside another system so things can always get a bit off…

That said, installing Linux ( *Ubuntu ) side-by-side on Windows at least ( macOS is another story ) should be really straightforward by creating a separate partition on your disk or even by using a dedicated hard drive just for the Linux OS. The default Ubuntu installer can do this for you as part of the installation process if you already have Windows installed in your machine for example. There are a lot of resources around the net on how you can achieve this so have look on that if you haven’t considered it already.

Cheers,
Petros

5

Thanks @felixfaire and @petros, I’m mainly interested in deploying the final product on a Linux machine. I’m wanting to make use of TooLoop, in fact the creator posted on the Cinder forum a while back ( Tooloop Open Media Server ) about it. I’ve run some other installations using it and removing Windows or OSX has removed so many headaches from my life. My primary aim of developing on a virtual machine is to save me having to setup a physical machine as a dev machine and instead just develop on my laptop. I’d prefer to do that than go the dual-boot route as that caused so many issues on my old machine I’d rather just avoid it altogether.

I’ll report back on any findings. Thanks again for the input.