Multipass GUI

I’ve written a basic GUI for Multipass:

Screenshot from 2018-09-20 13-03-16

You can hack on it in GitHub. It’s downloadable as a Snap (automatically updated from the git branch).

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For some reason the “Connect” button crashes when running as a Snap, it runs fine if you build locally. It also appears it might not be working on first run, perhaps due the command line tool prompting the user on first run.

I initially tried to use the grpc interface, but ended up wrapping the command line.

If anyone has some nice artistic skill please provide a nice icon for it!

That shouldn’t happen, we check if we’re in an interactive session and only prompt then. Are you sure that’s the reason? Please file a bug if you find that’s the case. You can reset the prompt by deleting /var/snap/multipass/common/data/multipassd/multipassd-send-metrics.yaml).

It’s speculation and we hoped you were doing that :slight_smile: The issue occurred when @kenvandine ran it for the first time, will investigate further.

Also we don’t ask on first launch, but rather on one of the subsequent ones.

Is this going to be abadoned now? I saw that you archived the trello card.

I would be sad to see a future native GTK GUI go away.

Hey @jyaku, we’re building a systray icon into the Multipass project itself now, and will be including a full GUI later on.

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You should set the license for the snap on the snap store, I think people will find it useful.

By the way, anybody knows why the snap of multipass on the snap store is proprietary when multipass itself is GPL?
What’s the point of that?

You’re right, we’ll fix that. The macOS and Windows backend are proprietary, so that’s a leftover from that. Thanks!

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I can’t start multipass gui on sway (wayland compositor):

~ multipass-gui
cp: '/home/xxx/.config/user-dirs.locale' and '/home/xxx/.config/user-dirs.locale' are the same file

(multipass-gui:6154): Gdk-WARNING **: 11:34:11.815: Wayland compositor does not support xdg_shell interface, not using Wayland display

(multipass-gui:6154): GLib-CRITICAL **: 11:34:11.815: g_hash_table_destroy: assertion 'hash_table != NULL' failed

(multipass-gui:6154): Gtk-WARNING **: 11:34:11.815: cannot open display: :0

Same thing if I try to force X11 via GDK_BACKEND=x11

Hi @copong, it looks like GDK falls back to X11 because of the missing xdg_shell protocol, but you don’t have XWayland running to serve X clients?

The snap is trying to use the old zxdg_shell_v6 Wayland protocol instead of xdg_shell, presumably because the snap is shipping an old GTK. Sway tends to aggressively cut support for deprecated protocols, and must have dropped everything but XDG stable. I don’t know why just setting GDK_BACKEND=x11 doesn’t work alone, but the following will run on X11:

GDK_BACKEND=x11 WAYLAND_DISPLAY=no multipass-gui

Note that no can be anything that’s not an active Wayland display.

EDIT: if the snap can be updated to use at least GTK 3.22.30 it should just work with Sway

I’ve updated the multipass-gui repository to handle a change in the multipass output and rebuild against a more recent version of GTK. Hope this works in Sway!

Note that this project is not being actively developed, but feel free to fork and play around with it if you have changes.

Another attempt in Python (with tkinter, cross platform) in progress (still too early). Aim is to have the UI look similar to VirtualBox/ VMWare Fusion for consistency.