[IMPROVEMENT] XCP-ng 20.04.01 compatility issue using wine

[mas1701]

Hi,

since XenCenter by Citrix, origin of XCP-ng Center, is the original management tool for XenServer / XCP-ng, (with XO/XOA being a re-creation pursued by Vates (and for their own benefit)), I would like to stick to the original.

Now that XCP-ng Center has a new maintainer, I wonder:

Could XCP-ng Center be made more compatible with Linux? XCP-ng in itself (the server part of it) is Linux, so I think it is strange that the management tool is Windows-only.

I have, with some success, installed XCP-ng Center on a system running Linux Mint 21.3 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS based) with Wine 9.4 (directly from WineHQ).

I noticed the following problems:

1. The main executable, displaying the splash screen, crashes.
2. The XenCenterMain.exe, launched directly mostly works, as long as all dependencies are installed within the Wine prefix used.
3. XenCenterMain.exe crashes, when switching to a VM console with graphical content. Didn't find a solution so far.
4. I didn't try Remote Desktop using XenCenterMain.exe, because I have other tools for that.
5. Installing additional Windows compatibility components inside of the Wine prefix can improve things a bit, but can also make everything much worse.

My question:

Would it be hard to create a Linux native port of XCP-ng Center (using Mono instead of .NET, maybe)? Or a more Wine-friendly version?

[cocoon]

There is already a pull request using mono here:
#225

[mas1701]

There is already a pull request using mono here: #225

Thanks for the info, I hope there'll be progress on that front, since the first step was already taken.

[ila-embsys]

There is already a pull request using mono here: #225

That draft need more attention. At least from a maintainer to decide if that groundwork is acceptable for project roadmap.

For example, I saw in the commit history that some work was done to prepare for a dotnet upgrade in the future. I've already downgraded dotnet to the latest v4.8 that Mono supports. I guess Mono will not support further version due to existence of dotnet core. But I'm not familiar with Mono infrastructure and not sure how the things works here.

What we can do with that draft is to cherry-pick commits that fix filenames and CI for working Mono artefacts. This action will clean up the build mess and prepare the code base for reimplementing some features in a cross-platform way.

[mas1701]

@ila-embsys
Since we don't know if and when your pull request will lead to improved Linux compatiblity for all using the official XCP-ng Center, maybe you could create a (temporary) fork and/or a test release of your experimental Mono version? If that's an option for you. I'd really like that.

[ila-embsys]

maybe you could create a (temporary) fork and/or a test release of your experimental Mono version

@mas1701, see the MR #225 update comment. That could be interesting for you.

[benapetr]

hello, you may find this interesting - I started a new project here https://github.com/benapetr/XenAdminQt

It's a complete rewrite of XenAdmin into Qt/C++ with goal of getting a native client for every major OS.

It already works great on Linux and macOS (it works on Windows too, but there isn't really any point since you can just run XenAdmin there).

There are some things missing and glitching - it's just an alpha version for now, but it's already usable for most of stuff, it can connect to any pool, handle VM creation and lifecycle, console etc. all tabs and wizards were ported. I will do some more cleanup and later I will add builds for linux and macOS, but you can already compile and run it yourself.