[fedora-virt] [ANNOUNCE] New release virt-manager 0.7.0

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 12:45:56PM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
> Jan ONDREJ (SAL) wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> >   after rebuild for F10 works well, just root password is not required when
> > started. I think this is a feature and I am happy, that I don't need always
> > click to run without privileges, but there is one problem.
> > 
> >   Starting an domain starts my serial console owned by root and is not
> > accesssible from virt-manager (virt-viewer). After changing ownership it's
> > immediatelly available. Is it possible to change this in time of virtual
> > machine creation? (in libvirt or where?)
> > 
> 
> Yes, this is one of the drawbacks of not running virt-manager as root:
> since the qemu:///system libvirt connection will launch your guests as
> root, a regular user won't be able to access ptys.
> 
> I don't know of a proper solution to it all, other then running the app
> as root or changing the the pty permissions as you did.

It is not worth running root just to get access to the serial PTYs. If
we want to kep accessing PTYs directly, then perhaps make them use a TCP
socket on localhost, instead of a PTY.  The real solution though is to 
get the serial datastream tunneled over the VNC connection. I want this
to be a goal for F12 - most of the work for that will be in KVM /GTK-VNc
space, then it'll mostly 'just work' for virt-manager.

> >   And last possible enhancement: when pressing F10 key in guest's serial
> > console, is it possible to avoid opening of "File menu" and send this key to
> > serial 0, as it is done in VGA console?
> > 
> 
> We would probably need some sort of keygrab process like we do for VNC
> to get this right. Not sure if that's even an option for the VTE widget
> though.

You don't need to have it directly supported in VTE - virt-manager itself
can call the neccessary functions whenever the widget gets keyboard
focus. To get a full solution there's basically three things you need
todo, disable F10 accelerator, disable global accelerators, and disable
menu bar shortcuts. In C code I do:

         /* This allows F10 activating menu bar */
        g_object_set_property(G_OBJECT(settings), "gtk-menu-bar-accel", &viewer->accelSetting);

        /* This allows global accelerators like Ctrl+Q == Quit */
        for (accels = viewer->accelList ; accels ; accels = accels->next) {
                gtk_window_add_accel_group(GTK_WINDOW(viewer->window), accels->data);
        }

        /* This allows menu bar shortcuts like Alt+F == File */
        for (i = 0 ; i < LAST_MENU ; i++) {
                GtkWidget *menu = glade_xml_get_widget(viewer->glade, menuNames[i]);
                g_signal_handler_disconnect(GTK_OBJECT(menu),
                                            viewer->accelMenuSig[i]);
        }


you can probably figure out the python equivalents 

Regards,
Daniel
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