GNOME Boxes lead developer Felipe Borges has been overhauling the application with a major rewrite and today announced the new beta release. GNOME Boxes has migrated to using the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita. The new GNOME Boxes code can also handle installing Microsoft Windows 11 now without needing any manual workarounds for Secure Boot or TPM requirements.
The new GNOME Boxes code also introduces a VSOCK device for accessing VM contexts and other improvements. With the revamped GNOME Boxes, it’s also shifting to a Flatpak-first and only model for distributing of new GNOME Boxes releases.
A gave up with boxes many years ago as it would not restore vms from snapshot reliably, something I use a lot.
What was wrong with the old Boxes?
It didn’t support containers or the more advanced features of libvirtd like virt-manager does, but it seemed fine for what it was the couple of times I tried it out.
This rewriting almost killed the project and I still fear for Bottles.
i REALLY needed this when my everything server was running since i managed it headlessly using vnc w a minimal installation of gnome.
virt-manager works okay, but it would be nicer not to have to install more than what’s needed for a headless setup.
You can use virt-manager over ssh, and you only need libvirt installed so probably already good if it’s a vm host. It works better for me than a full gui over vnc.
i tried that with x forwarding over ssh and it didn’t work all that well; what’s why i switched to vnc.
you can use ssh to forward the port and then use virt-manages locally to manage the remote server
i gave that a shot too. it works, it’s just that the vm management was only part of what i needed since it also controlled the sdn.
Like arsecroft says, virt manager has this ability built into the application itself. You add another session to the ui and choose ssh. No X forwarding needed, no gui needed on the server at all, don’t need the virt manager app on the server just the client. Cockpit also works as a web based ui.
NICE! i didn’t catch that part and thank you for making me aware.
i did try cockpit and i had better luck with it too.
If you give it a shot make sure you use an ssh key, it doesn’t like passwords.
the server itself died a little while ago so it’s going to be while before it try and i planned on using cli only to manage the vm’s and the sdn’s; but i’ll give this a try before doing that.
Hopefully the rebuild goes well!
Great. Love the improvement.
Cool
