SPICE: Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments

SPICE is a protocol for remote access to computers. It consists of several separate components:

• A server which captures frames and sends them to the clients
• Clients render the captured frames and displays them on the local computer
• Agents that run in the (possibly virtual) computer and facilitate some aspects of the remote interaction, such as copy-pasting or file transfers.
• A special kind of agent, the streaming agent, is designed to capture frames as a live video stream using hardware acceleration if available in the given computing environment.

This repository is simply a way to access all SPICE components from a single location.

Building SPICE

SPICE can be built using two methods at the moment:

• Using just make, in which case all dependencies and configurations are dealt with using the c3d/build makefile-based build system. This approach requires pkg-config, but not autoconf or automake. It has been tested successfully on Fedora 27 and macOS High Sierra. It is generally much faster, and does not require any package installation, which makes it the recommended method for development that impact multiple components (e.g. protocol changes). To use this method, simply type (from the top level):

   make -j
  

  You can get help about the available build targets with:

   make help
  

  Additional tips on using this system can be found at https://github.com/c3d/build

• Using autotools, which will be more familiar for many long-time software maintainers. This approach is more suited to installation, and requires early-stage components (e.g. spice-protocol) to be installed in order to satisfy the dependencies of later modules. To build using autotools, simply type (form the top level):

   ./autogen.sh "make -j install"
  

Once you have built with autogen.sh, subsequent invokations of make will use the autotool-generated makefiles. You can revert at any time to the c3d/build build system using make restore.