GNOME Boxes jumped in unstable version 3.7.3 and brings a plethora of improvements. This is also the the first release that makes use of new automated installation API of libosinfo.
Boxes of course now has a search provider and you can now launch your virtual machines faster, directly from GNOME Shell!
libosinfo
Since this is the first version of Boxes that use liosinfo I though to quickly check on it.
libosinfo is a GObject based library API for managing information about operating systems, hypervisors and the (virtual) hardware devices they can support. It includes a database containing device metadata and provides APIs to match/identify optimal devices for deploying an operating system on a hypervisor. Via the magic of GObject Introspection, the API is available in all common programming languages with demos for javascript (GJS/Seed) and python (PyGObject)
Boxes Search Provider
What’s the point to search for Virtual Machines into Shell? Simply you can’t just search, but you can also launch a VM. So instead of opening Boxes, looking for the VM and then launch it, you can speed up this process with the help of Shell.
To be honest I didn’t try that, as Boxes Search Provider doesn’t work, at least in my installation, but I am sure this is how to work, like the rest of GNOME Apps.
*That was my mistake, Boxes had a Search Provider in GNOME 3.6, which I hadn’t noticed. So the only difference here is that you can switch it (On/Off). Sorry!
GNOME Boxes 3.7.3 Changelog
I am not using Boxes, so I cannot really comment on these changes, but for those who are using it, here they are:
- More robust VM naming for unknown media.
- Ensure media presented in wizard are actually available.
- Provide visual indication of boxes being saved.
- The ‘pause’ button should only be enabled if any of the selected machines support saving and is not already in saved state.
- Don’t lose tracking of installation if user quits Boxes during installation.
- Exit to collection view if the VM goes to a non-running state
- Exit to collection view on display disconnect only for current item.
- Don’t crash when running Boxes while it’s already running.
- Make it actually possible to pause VMs under installation.
- Add support for changing the CD-ROM device/ISO from properties.
- Add troubleshooting log viewer to system properties.
- Add usbredir on/off status to configure output.
- Remove ‘Simple’ from the generic name so Boxes doesn’t show in gnome-shell’s search result when searching for this term.
- Automatically download & install pre-installation drivers libosinfo knows about (currently only virtio storage driver). This makes manual download of win-tools ISO redudant.
- Assamese
- Kannada
- Tamil
- Galician
- Some other functional and non-functional improvements and fixes.
- libosinfo >= 0.2.2
- glib-2.0 >= 2.32
- valac >= 0.17.3 (build-time only)