pixinsight and cloud computing (linux)

[pfile]

similar to this thread: http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=7192.0

i have instantiated a windows server machine in google's compute engine. PI seems to run fine; i connect to the machine with RDP. only problem is that the single CPU performance is not that hot compared to a desktop machine (the GCE machines seem to be made from various generation Xeons running at 2.2GHz). however you can configure a machine with up to 32 CPUs (although for some reason my quotas are set to 24 CPUs), so the multicore performance should be pretty incredible.

what i'm wondering is if this can be done with a linux host. i'm assuming that the framebuffer provided by Xvnc will not cut it for pixinsight. is there any other way to generate a virtual display on linux that PI would be happy with? or is windows the only game in town for this type of work?

thanks

rob

[georg.viehoever]

I tried VNC a while ago with Amazon EC2, and it worked fine, I just preferred to use Windows with Remote Desktop because of the convenient integration with local Clipboard, file system etc..

Georg

[pfile]

OK i will try it then; i figured that VNC was a non-starter under the assumption that there's (probably) no video acceleration on Xvnc. maybe that's a wrong assumption.

i guess RDC has the advantage of doing a lot of the rendering on the local machine vs. copying bitmaps over the network. however the windows interface is just different enough that i had a hard time using it. the local filesystem integration is nice but it turns out my network upload speeds are too slow to really make use of it. tried to open a 6GB project on the virtual machine and almost died of old age.

rob

[pfile]

ok - the linux machine worked - performance was much, much better than on the windows server 2012 instance. however, something was really messed up with my locale - although in the shell my keyboard worked perfectly, inside pixinsight the keyboard mapping was completely crazy... no idea what language it thought i was running but everything was gibberish. i was running ubuntu 16; somehow i was not able to establish the normal desktop environment in Xvnc. i also had to install the gstreamer 0.1 libraries.

i guess i'll try a fedora distro and see what happens.

on osx, control-S removes the STF. is it possible to cause windows and linux to use that same shortcut? (it seems to be set to F12 or control-F12 on those platforms.)

rob