GNOME developers create Boxes for virtualisation

With greater use of virtual machines and remote machine connections, GNOME developers are working on a new integration for the desktop environment under the name Boxes. The Boxes design offers a single environment to create boxes which can be local or remote virtual machines or remote SPICE protocol sessions on other machines. The developers have been working on a Vala-based implementation of Boxes and improving the libvirt and spice-gtk foundation. They have now announced their first release of the early code and have a screencast demonstrating the application's capabilities.

Boxes in action

Developer Zeeshan Ali Khattak (aka Zeenix) explains in a blog posting that, although the developers already use virt-manager and that addressed the needs of a enterprise-level system administrator, there was a need for a virtualisation and remote connection application for the more typical end-user and that need could be met with Boxes. As the project is "still in its infancy", there are a lot of issues – the biggest one currently being the breaking of floppy support in Qemu. With the newly implemented UI, though, users are already able to create and destroy virtual machines or remote system connections with equal ease. The developers are looking for help to work on the UI and to enhance the C libraries, libosinfo and libvirt-glib, which the project relies upon. They would like, for example, help in creating an API to deal with libvirt's use of XML for configuration.

(djwm)