Virtual Machines, Python, Clutter and Ubuntu

...I'm slowly making progress while working on my dialogue editor project.

In working with my first open source project, I'm finding that a lot of exceptional effort goes into the system - and that it's really quite elegant.

But it's also a bit of a nuisance...which I can mostly attribute to my own expectations and background. See, I've always considered myself more of a visitor whenever I've used linux, not an actual, permanent user. I've found many neat features in it, many that I'd increasingly like to combine with my windows rig - but it's only on this project that I've come to the conclusion that serious programming will often necessitate that you do it from a 'nix system.

See, I came accross this excellent UI framework called Clutter, being developed by openedhand. It's drawn using OpenGL for some parts, but native operating system rendering for fonts. And it has bindings such that it can be used from python.

Most UI libraries will give you one or two of these - an extensive library of premade functionality, excellent text rendering, hardware accelerated graphics rasterisation, and an elegant application programmer interface.

Clutter gives all 4. It's also a so-called copyleft licence, meaning that code which uses clutter can be proprietary if need be; but any modifications of clutter itself need to be published as either gpl or lgpl.

So it's great and all, but there is a catch. Clutter is a bitch to compile because it requires a lot of other libraries as binaries...and of course, neither clutter itself, nor the other libraries, are available as binaries on windows.

Enter VMware Player by VMware, and a virtual machine, called a virtual appliance, with ubuntu installed.

I managed to get it up and running in the course of about 4 hours....and that's on linux.

Like I said, it's a bitch. But now, it's all up and configured on the virtual machine, so work can soon begin...I do need to build a production pipeline soon, though, such that I can do test-runs on the native host machine, which is the next thing I'll be doing, and from there, well...hopefully, I'll link the virtual machine up with a repository, and have it run a virtual file server of compiled binaries....and _then_ I'll be able to work on the actual application =P