[PVE-User] Doing without the Java console

[Flavio Stanchina]

I'd like to know how the Proxmox VE developers feel about making it
possible to work with PVE without the Java VNC console. I'll spare you all
the technical and ethical reasons why I would prefer to get rid of Java on
my machines, but there are three that I just can't bear:
1) Java is not Free Software, no matter what they say, so it's the only
non-free component in an otherwise fully free infrastructure (and please
don't mention OpenJDK and IcedTea, it just doesn't work well enough to
replace the Sun^WOracle JRE).
2) the Java plugin has a history of being unsafe, so I'd rather just get
rid of it.
3) the Oracle lawsuit against Google.

Moreover, the PVE console eats some keys on PVE 2.0, for example the TAB
key. I hope this can be fixed, but if it can't it's one more reason to have
another option.

I see a few alternatives which would be relatively easy to do, listed in
order of preference:
* add an option to open the VNC console of a VM (with proper authorization
of course) on a specified port; I've done this with a few entries in
/etc/inetd.conf on PVE 1.x, as suggested in a forum post, but IIRC it
doesn't work with PVE 2.0 (I think I tried to debug why but didn't get to
the bottom of it).
* enable Spice; I tried building a qemu-kvm package with Spice enabled,
then added the proper options to the VM config and it works, but in a
production environment I'd want support out of the box.
* use the gtk-vnc plugin where available; not mature, not available
everywhere, but it works and making it better is not a hard problem.

Of course I want ALL OF THEM! :)

-- 
Flavio Stanchina
Informatica e Servizi
Trento - Italy

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer