Legacy Host Application build

Warning

The Host Application is a legacy server application. New installations should use the prebuilt Looking Glass IDD. These build instructions are retained for the complete matching B7 stack described in Legacy Host Application.

Note

Host in this context refers to the Looking Glass (LG) host server application, to which the LG client connects to, it thus does not refer to the host OS!

A common setup is to have a host OS running a guest VM. In such a setup the client application runs on the host OS; and the host application on the guest VM.

The term Host application was chosen over Guest application, because LG can be run in a VM to VM configuration, in which case both Host Application and Client Application are run inside VM Guests.

These instructions help you build the host yourself from the downloaded source code.

Warning

Building the host from source code is not recommended for most purposes, and should only be attempted by users who are prepared to handle issues on their own. Please download the pre-built binary installers from https://looking-glass.io/downloads for stability, and increased support.

Note

The pre-built binaries also include NvFBC support built in, which is only available to current Nvidia SDK license holders, and cannot be enabled when building the host without also having a license.

(link)

For Windows on Windows

  1. Download and install msys2 x86_64 from http://www.msys2.org/ following the setup instructions provided

  2. Run the MSYS2 shell

  3. Download build dependencies with pacman

pacman -Fy
pacman -Sy git make mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake

  1. Change directory to the source tree with cd

  2. Configure the project and build it

mkdir host/build
cd host/build
cmake -G "MSYS Makefiles" ..
make

For Linux on Linux

Make a host/build directory, then run cmake

mkdir host/build
cd host/build
cmake ..
make

For Windows cross compiling on Linux

Like For Linux on Linux, but using the mingw64 toolchain to cross-compile a Windows .exe file.

mkdir host/build
cd host/build
cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../toolchain-mingw64.cmake ..
make

Building the Windows installer

  1. Build the host on Linux.

  2. Install nsis

apt-get install nsis

  1. Use makensis to build the installer.

cd host/build/platform/Windows
makensis installer.nsi

This will build looking-glass-host-setup.exe under host/build/platform/Windows/looking-glass-host-setup.exe

See also

Installing the Host