Re: New user getting started questions

Thomas Leonard
2021-11-11T18:37:10Z

On Thu, 11 Nov 2021 at 11:09, Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is> wrote:
>
> Thomas Leonard <talex5@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On Wed, 10 Nov 2021 at 12:59, Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is> wrote:
> >>
> >> Thomas Leonard <talex5@gmail.com> writes:
> >>
> >> > On Wed, 3 Nov 2021 at 11:37, Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is> wrote:
> > [...]
> >> >> Also, I've been following some Qubes work recently, and it sounds like
> >> >> they might be interested in doing X11 over Wayland in a way that
> >> >> wouldn't need special compositor support (and the corresponding
> >> >> potential for security bugs). It sounds like it would be a lot of work
> >> >> though, so we'll see…
> >> >
> >> > Isn't that what Sommelier and wayland-proxy-virtwl are both doing
> >> > already though? There's no need for any X11 support in the host
> >> > compositor with them.
> >>
> >> Oh I didn't realise that. So the host compositor doesn't have to
> >> implement an X11 window manager and speak back to the Xserver, like it
> >> does in a normal XWayland setup[1]?
> >
> > Correct; the proxy acts as the X11 window manager to Xwayland, and
> > just talks plain Wayland to the host. In fact, I managed to work
> > around several problems with Sway's built-in Xwayland integration by
> > using the proxy instead, even on the host (see
> > https://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2021/10/30/xwayland/#bonus-features).
> >
> >> [1]: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html#sect-X11-Application-Support-architecture
>
> Ah, I now realise you explained all of this in your blog post. Sorry
> for the silly questions!
>
> By the way, I'm very curious about "[com] is a SpectrumOS VM I use for
> email, etc.". _I_ don't even consider myself to be running Spectrum,
> because as far as I'm concerned there's no integrated system to run yet.
> So what's in that VM that you consider to be Spectrum? :)

Well, I think of it as a spectrum VM, but I guess it has changed a
bit! It's based on your demo VM from early 2021, running Wayfire under
Sommelier. Except I replaced Sommelier with my proxy, and I removed
Wayfire. Instead, it runs "socat vsock-listen:5000 exec:dash" in a
loop and I can launch programs inside it from the host by writing to
the vsock. e.g. I have a "ff-com" command to launch Firefox in the com
VM. It's a bit more Qubes-like than Spectrum really. I also got it to
get the applications from the main NixOS repository, as they're more
up-to-date, and I replaced the kernel with a newer one because I
needed better io_uring support for another project. But your basic
build structure and execline boot scripts are still there!

It was a useful skeleton, but now I understand how it works, I should
probably replace it with something more standard...

--
talex5 (GitHub/Twitter) http://roscidus.com/blog/
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