Linux Guest Tools: a call to open source

G

(GalaxyMaster)

Hunter
The PRLVIDEO driver in guest tools is using a very outdated technology: Xinerama extension. All major Linux distributions switched to XRandR about a decade ago. I think it is time for Parallels do the same :).

P.S. Also, if Parallels wants to make a huge impact -- open source your guest tools and the community will provide some steam behind the development (I know I would). There are numerous limitations around the current drivers inside the guest which have nothing to do with licensing or proprietary secrets. If you had your guest tools sources on, say GitHub - you still maintain the control of what is shipped with the product, but you give opportunity to developers all around the world to raise pull requests to fix issues and introduce features your customers need. Additionally, having the tools open sourced will give distribution packager to include them as part of their distribution, as the result Linux VM support will improve tremendously (I am a Pro subscription customer and it pains me to re-assemble the whole guest tools package for the distribution of my choice, which is AltLinux, every time either is updated).
 
Hi GalaxyMaster,

We use XrandR Api (1.2) in our prlvideo xserver driver. We have Xinerama to support legacy Linux GUI environments.

I've renamed the request to leave the part about open sourcing Tools opened for votes.
 
As a Linux user I would like to have a seamless experience in setting up my Linux VM, as easy as typing
Code: 
sudo doing/rpm/whatever install parallels-tools
no matter which distro I'm using, and which version.

If you open the Linux Guest OS discussion forums, almost every post in the first page relates to "add support to ver x", "add support to distribution y", "error installing tools on z".

Please release your parallels tools (or a subset of them) as open source and include them in the major Linux distributions so that the community can support Parallels.
This approach worked really well for VMware and their open-vm-tools.
 
alev said:
Hi GalaxyMaster,

We use XrandR Api (1.2) in our prlvideo xserver driver. We have Xinerama to support legacy Linux GUI environments.

I've renamed the request to leave the part about open sourcing Tools opened for votes.
Click to expand...


Well - from where I sit, a current list of *nix distros that are supported, and those users have found workarounds for would help.
Don't get me started on the FreeBSD variants - GhostBSD and NetBSD are two of interest ... the tools absolutely do not work in FreeBSD environments.
How about an option to skip all the fancy pseudo video drivers and proceed directly to the open sourced variants.
 
That would break their whole business model ;)

They forced linux users to upgrade to Parallels 18 just to enable newer kernel support (unless you hacked the patch to make it work)

It would be even nicer if they were compatible with open-vm-tools :shrug:
 
yes, please give some more love to linux guests. upgrading kernel breaks the tools more often than not, and i really need to be able to copy/paste and transfer files between host and guests
 
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