coherence / unity

[igge]

Hello,

I've just seen some cool videos of the "coherence" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN9jNNeEd98 and "unity" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIApJMzGzDQ features in paralells/vmware. I think this would be a really cool feature to have! Unfortunalty it's only for Mac so therefore I'm turning to Virtual Box.

Since Virtual Box is GPL I'm turning to the user community (and also Innotek) to see if I can get a discussion going on how it could be implemented. I have just downloaded and compiled the source, haven't actually looked at it yet so I don't know much about the internal structure of Virtual Box. But anyways, I thought like this...

- The virtual windows machine could run in "full screen", but not render to the screen but to a back buffer.

- The guest extension running inside Windows could query the Windows os about the position and size of the windows and notify the virtual box app whenever something changes.

- The virtual box app would open corresponding windows on the X desktop (and keep the z order the same as in windows) and then "cut out holes" from the windows desktop and show that inside each of the X windows.

What do you think? Is this feasible?

If so, where is a good source of information to learn about the internal structure of Virtual Box in order to hack on it?

-- Igge

[stefan.becker]

Search for "Seamless".

[markba]

What's really cool in unity: the merge of the Windows-menu in the system-menu of the host. In that way, you can get rid of the Windows task.
Some people don't like the taskbar and wish it could be minimized to the system tray:
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=1948

With this option (merging Windows-menu with the host-menu), there's no need to display the taskbar, not even temporarely.

[dayde]

I would really like seemless windows to interact with the host xwindows to allow dragging and dropping of files from the X to virtualbox, along with the ability to open linux apps from within VirtualBox (by clicking on a hyperlink, or double clicking on a file for example) and vice versa. Seemless windows does a nice job of giving you the appearance of a contiguous windows/linux desktop, but you are still restricted to going back and forth between linux and windows. With that kind of integration available as an option virtualbox would truly be seemless from a functional standpoint.

[Technologov]

Besides Unity and Coherence, there is another player, OpenLINA.

They seem to make new level of guest-host integration experience, but for Linux guests-only, this time. Maybe some of their technology could be copied over here.