CollabVM: Difference between revisions

 

=== Official VMs ===

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The invention of the concept of a public collaborative virtual machine that others could use through the internet is hard to pinpoint. This concept seems to have existed as early as mid 2004, with a user of a forum posting an IP address and a password for a VNC server, claiming it was "open for anyone to use". The concept of collaborating with people through a virtual machine can be traced back to 2010, and the concept of users taking turns to collaborate with a VM online can be traced back to April 2014, the official release date of [[socket.computer]].

 

CollabVM was inspired by the website [https://web.archive.org/web/20150210201435/https://www.manymo.com/ Manymo], which allowed users to run an Android virtual machine in a web browser, but is no longer available.

 

 

CollabVM 0.01 (originally named "Browser Computer") started in July 2014, as a fun experiment. Instead of a virtual machine, it ran in an actual, physical machine running Windows 95, with a basic node.js script to simply connect to a VNC Server that was running with no password. This version did not have turns - if there were more than 2 users on the VM at once, they would have to use the chat to collaborate or try and fight for control. The page in question was also not hosted on [http://computernewb.com/ Computernewb]. The project was later reconfigured to connect to a remote QEMU session due to people constantly turning the machine off, closing the VNC Server, or destroying the machine. It was fairly unpopular, with only around 5-6 unique people controlling it every 2* weeks or so. The project was closed off in November 2014, but would later be reborn in February 2015.

 

 

CollabVM 1.0 (known as the [[Socket.io|Socket.IO]] Era to some) was the first popular iteration of CollabVM, and the second overall. Although initially unpopular, it exploded in popularity in April 2015 after being posted onto Reddit. It ran the [[socket.computer]] engine, but had a few modifications in place, the screen was scaled, the laptop image was removed, an administrator panel was modded into it, and two exploits (one being an exploit which allowed anyone to run arbitrary QMP commands) were found and then later fixed.

The site had a Xat chatroom (ID <code>computernewb</code>) embedded into the bottom, as well as an online counter which showed how many people were online. Later, this was added to the server itself. It was replaced with CollabVM 1.1 on July 28, 2015.

 

 

CollabVM 1.1 was the third iteration of CollabVM. This iteration was a very important milestone in CollabVM's history as it was when the new C++ rewrite of [[collab-vm-server]] 1.1 done by [[Cosmic Sans]] was officially out of beta and released onto the site.

This was also the first version of [[collab-vm-server]] that [[Experimental VM]] ran. On December 29, 2015 a new server (LunaNode?) was purchased which ran [[QEMU]] far better than the old one. On October 18, 2016, the binaries for CollabVM 1.1 were released.

 

 

CollabVM 1.2 is the fourth iteration of CollabVM. This iteration included several updates to the existing 1.1 core, and added some new features. These features included the Vote Reset, which allows users to reset the virtual machine even when an admin is not online (now users could simply vote reset instead of potentially waiting for hours for an admin), support for multiple virtual machines, a brand new homepage which showed the current running virtual machines along with screenshots of them running, an issue that let users impersonate others was fixed, and the turn counter now counted how long you had to wait.

On December 12, 2018, a Windows port of [[collab-vm-server]] 1.2.8 was made available by [[CHOCOLATEMAN]] and modeco80.

 

 

CollabVM 2.0 is the fifth iteration of CollabVM. This version was originally planned to be 1.3, although since it was renamed to 2.0 since it shares none of the old code from the original server. This iteration includes several updates including stability updates, more modern libraries, VNC and RDP support, full VNC and RDP audio support, accounts, native Windows support, and more.

It was dropped from being used on the official instance on June 2nd 2020 due to being extremely unstable, XSS, an overabundance of bugs, Ceiridge's crash exploit, and a million other exploits.

 

 

CollabVM 2.0 was way too unstable to be used as a full time version, so we switched back to 1.2. Going back, we actually got more features in the "post 2.0" updates, such as JPEG support, bugfixes and stability.

All of the above were merged in to 1.2.10.

 

 

CollabVM 3.0 is going to be the successor to 1.x and 2.0, and started development on August 25th, 2021. It is a major overhaul compared to CVM 1.x and 2.0. Some of the things that will happen in this update include: