Window Maker Live (Linux distro)

[wmlive]

ah sorry. I mean copying and pasting between the QEMU virtual machine and host machine.

I fear there is nothing i could do about this as this is outside of wmlive's scope.
I assume this to be rather a matter of the underlying virtualization environment.

[jeffburg]

Yeah, I think it's pretty optional because it's a niche use case. But I mention it because in normal debian it works out of the box. It appears that its related to this package

https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/qemu-guest-agent

[wmlive]

Yeah, I think it's pretty optional because it's a niche use case. But I mention it because in normal debian it works out of the box. It appears that its related to this package

https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/qemu-guest-agent

The qemu-guest-agent package is usually always included with any wmlive release and doesn't appear to provide any kind of copy/paste functionality between guest and host.

Further investigation shows that another package named spice-vdagent provides this missing functionality when installed within the guest:

Code Select Expand

# apt-get -m -t bookworm-backports install spice-vdagent
To make it actually work after installation, it is required to add a channel in the host's virtmanger to the guest VM as follows:


If com.redhat.spice.0 is already in use, just increment its number to com.redhat.spice.1 to use it with qemu-vdagent. Maybe an equivalent configuration needs to be performed in the UTM qemu frontend?

While it seems possible to paste from host to guest by simply choosing a listing entry in the parcellite clipboard application, the usual keyboard combinations don't seem to have any effect. Also, i was unable so far to figure out the reverse copy/paste direction from guest to host.

In any case, that's an interesting approach i wasn't aware of before! Usually i apply a shared screen session to exchange copy and paste data, since i typically access guest hosts via ssh connection. So i was not even missing this specific functionality before.

Thanks again, Jeffrey! You particular perspective helps a lot broadening wmlive's scope! Keep it coming if you are not already tired of it. 

[jeffburg]

As a non-linux user, I am happy to provide uninformed opinions 🥴

[wmlive]

An updated ARM64 ISO containing a few improvements and corrections (with special thanks to @jeffburg) has been uploaded to sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/wmlive-bookworm-12.12/aarch64_experimental/, replacing the earlier version.

Nevertheless, the graphical installer must be dispensed with until further notice. As it turned out, when the graphical installer was forced to activate using the kernel parameter DEBIAN_FRONTEND=gtk, this unexpectedly causes the carefully configured preseed configuration to be simply ignored.
Unfortunately, this is fatal for our purposes, as it means that an absolutely essential comprehensive custom script cannot be executed at the very end of the installation before the first boot.
This certainly warrants opening a bug report at Debian.

Other than that, installation via serial console functions as designed and both the live session and installed system works as normal as can be expected.

Has anyone (apart from @jeffburg) already been able to test the previous ARM64 version and would like to share their thoughts? I am mostly aiming at (preferably negative) feedback from third parties providing a different user perspective than my own.