GNOME Boxes is an open source application that allows users to access remote or virtual systems. It is distributed as part of the GNOME project and uses the well known Qemu software for the actual virtualization.
Features at a glance
The application can be used to connect to a local virtual machine, connect to a work machine from home, view, access and use remote systems, as well as local and remote virtual machines.
In addition, the program allows users to access, view and use virtual machines that are stored on removable media like USB sticks or external hard disk drives, as well as to configure access for various software on a local virtual machine.
Furthermore, GNOME Boxes can be used to view, access and use shared machines and connections, share connections, search for connections, upload and publish virtual machines, and organize favorites.
Designed for GNOME
The user interface follows the GNOME HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) and presents users with an empty window, where their only choice is to press the “New” button in order to create a box.
Getting started with GNOME Boxes
Creating a box will enable users to use another operating system directly from your current session, as well as to connect to an existing machine over the network, or create a virtual machine that runs on top of your computer.
It supports ISO images, pause, resume and force shutdown of existing virtual machines. Another interesting feature is that it doesn’t create virtual hard disk images on your local disk drive, instead it starts the boot medium image immediatelly.
While its run-time dependencies include shared-mime-info, among its build-time requirements we can mention Qemu, Vala, GTK+, Clutter-GTK, GUdev, as well as the libvirt-glib and libosinfo libraries.
Bottom line
Summing up, GNOME Boxes is a very good replacement for the old Vinagre application that was used under the GNOME desktop environment to connect to remote machines through SSH, RDP, Spice and VNC protocols, as well as for Oracle’s VirtualBox virtualization software.
