Running Linux shiva app in virtual environment

[flippout]

So we've been planning some time to support user sharing of videos to facebook etc. by letting users upload a small .xml file to a server, let the server to the heavy lifting of video rendering, and then the server posts the video.

Step 1 - rendering video: complete! After over a week of hard work, I'm happy to report that I can record frames, capture audio, and encode it at a faster-than-realtime pace.

Step 2: Getting this to run in any sort of cloud-computing environment.

Since these services (ex: Amazon EC2) are usually much cheaper when using Unix, as a starting point, I decided to try installing Debian Linux in VirtualBox on my windows machine, to see if I could get our app running there in some kind of software rendering mode.

The result: not so promising. The app technically loads - but all I see are the "2D" hud elements - nothing in the 3D scene shows up (just black.) Frustratingly, there doesn't seem to be any kind of output log either.

So I guess I'm just wondering if I'm barking up the wrong tree here. Should I expect to be able to run a Shiva app in a virtual environment at all?
I wonder what it would take to support this if not currently?

Maybe there's a better linux distro with better Shiva/3D compatibility?

Thanks in advance for any pointers. It's our one last big technical unknown.

[Sterlingwh]

Have you installed the Virtualbox Guest addition in Debian? ......and have you given you guest enough Video memory?

[flippout]

No I haven't done that yet, I'll give it a try tonight. But I'm wondering if that's going to be an accurate representation of how a headless server will be working. I don't really want to share my gpu with it - I want to get things working with software drivers.

[flippout]

Alright so I installed the guest additions and allocated 128 mb of video memory to my VirtualBox machine. And I also discovered that I can run from terminal to get some more info.

With guest additions installed, my app actually exits instantly, with this error:

OpenGL Error: Can't patch size is too small.(glXSwapBuffers)

Interestingly, I can run TheHunt demo from the Stonetrip website (at around 15 fps...Not clear if it's using hardware acceleration or not.)

I'll do some more tinkering - I do know one of the plugins my app references is not yet setup for Linux - but it doesn't seem like it's even getting that far.