GNOME Boxes is a simple GNOME 3 application to access remote or virtual systems. It is based on a design from Jon McCann and Jakub Steiner.
Use cases
- Connect to a local virtual machine for testing.
- Connecting to a work machine from home.
- Connect to a work machine over a low quality cellular network.
Rationale
While virt-manager does a very good job as a virtual machine management software, its very much tailored for system administration and virtual machines. Boxes on the other hand is targeted towards typical desktop end-user who either just want a very safe and easy way to try out new operating systems or new (potentially unstable) versions of her/his favorite operating system(s), or need to connect to a remote machine (home-office connection being a typical use-case). For this reason, Boxes will not provide many of the advanced options to tweak virtual machines provided by virt-manager. Instead Boxes will focus on getting things working out of the box with very little input from user.
That said, Boxes will be sharing a lot of code-base with virt-manager project, mainly in the form of libvirt, libosinfo (not yet used by virt-manager) and qemu.
Requirements:
- Build-time:
libvirt-glib
qemu
libosinfo
gudev
vala (not if building from release tarballs)
gtk+
clutter-gtk
- Run-time:
shared-mime-info
Product's homepage
Here are some key features of "GNOME Boxes":
View, access, and use:
· remote machines
· remote virtual machines
· local virtual machines
· When technology permits, set up access for applications on local virtual machines
· View, access, and use virtual machines on removable media
· View, access, and use shared connection / machines
· Share connections?
· Upload / publish virtual machines
· Select favorites
· Search for connections
Requirements:
· GNOME
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
Add support for import of ready-made disk images. Supported formats are:
· qcow2
· qcow
· cow
· raw (.img extension)
· vdi
· vmdk
· vpc
· cloop
· Also gzip compressed images are supported.
· Show a spinner on top of under-construction boxes in collection view.
· Fix cancellation of ovirt authentication.
· Asynchronously initialize brokers so UI doesn't remain empty for slow brokers.
· Handle SPICE connection errors and avoid user seeing a stuck UI indefinitely in case of such errors.
· Fix selectionbar overlay not becoming visible on right-click.
· Fix Boxes showing mostly invisible wizard when launched with a media argument.
· Fix display ending-up at the top of item in collection view at the end of display->collection animation when linked against clutter 1.16.
· Fix ellipsizing of wizard summary labels.
· Use new libgovirt API to know the host subject to use to validate the SSL certificate of a given VM without user having to set environment variable.
· If recommended/min memory for an OS or OS itself is unknown, we now allocate 1G rather than 500M. 500M is too little for most modern OSs.
· Drop file extension when naming a VM by its source media filename.
· Ensure that newly created boxes appear first in the collection view.
· Remove now redundant style & associated data.
Added/updated/fixed translations:
· Assamese
· Brazilian Portuguese
· Catalan
· Czech
· Galician
· German
· Kannada
· Odia
· Polish
· Simplified Chinese
· Slovak
· Spanish
· Telugu
Dependencies changed:
· govirt >= 0.1.0 (optional)
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