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This is completely awesome. When I saw http://cb.vu a few years ago I thought hey, someone has finally done it, but that turned out to be a hack. Kudos to Bellard once again.

Nitpicking: the terminal emulation is messed up. It keeps resizing horizontally, and less gets confused. I'm sure the terminal emulator was fun to play with. A correct vt100 state machine implementation [1] would probably not be quite as fun [2]. There's a vt100.js library used by a couple projects that might improve things. [3]

[1] http://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser

[2] http://vt100.net/emu/vt500_parser.png

[3] http://fzort.org/bi/o.php

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Indeed, this is completely awesome. I first thought it was some remotely hosted virtual machine, but it really runs inside the browser. Insane! Especially considered how fast it is.

When he adds X, we can run Firefox inside Linux inside Firefox inside Linux :')

Edit: seems the terminal emulator supports ANSI escape codes such as the 16 Linux colors, but not the XTerm 256 color mode (\e[38;5;CCm) or Konsole 24 bit (\e[38;2;RR;GG;BBm). Guess it could be easily added as it's HTML.

> When he adds X, we can run Firefox inside Linux inside Firefox inside Linux :')

Reddit has a meme for that. ;) (downvote away, I've earned it!)

The Esteban one?

"I don't always write Linux Kernels"

"But when I do, it's in browser hosted Javascript"

The "yo dawg".

or the INCEPTION for that matter :)

HN would appreciate if you left reddit at reddit.

No network connection yet either :(

~ # ifconfig

     lo   Link encap:Local Loopback

          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0    
                               
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1    
                          
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0  
                  
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0    
              
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0                              
               
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B

This would require a server-side component, as the browser has cross-domain limitations and couldn't generate arbitrary network traffic anyway. You could tunnel through websockets, however.

> When he adds X, we can run Firefox inside Linux inside Firefox inside Linux :')

Skip the middle man, output gtk via html5 http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2011/03/15/gtk-html-backend-upd... (I don't actually know if it still has dependencies on X11 :P)

That would be even better. One could make a Linux device driver to directly access Canvas, WebGL, or even the DOM. It seems that in my post I used "X" as a generic name for "Linux graphics" which is pretty short-sighted.

Gecko's GTK backend has dependencies on X11, if that's what you were asking about.

Interestingly, you can run Firefox inside of Firefox... just enter the url: chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

why??

Because XUL is rendered with gecko.

Sadly my dreams were also crushed when I discovered that lynx wasn't in there.

However, wget is there, so all the building blocks are in place.

As far as I can guess, any networking implementation would have to pass low level requests through a proxy on the server, which would end up making things pretty slow even on an unburdened server.

There's a port of urxvt to JavaScript: https://github.com/paddymul/rxvt-js

I just tried out my ansi_colours.sh [1] script and it mostly worked. A few notes:

wget is available, and it would be cool to piggy back the linux network stack through the browser.

cut & paste support is a must for any terminal

The space characters are very narrow. Needs to be monospace.

All fairly minor compared to the coolness of this.

[1] http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ansi_colours.sh

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