Tutorial: Installing An Operating System On Boxes (Gnome-Boxes) The Gnome 3 Application

Tutorial: Installing an Operating System on Boxes (gnome-boxes) the GNOME 3 Application

 

Boxes (gnome-boxes) is a front end for remote or virtual systems similar to virt-manager. The difference being is Boxes is targeted to those who may not consider themselves as system administrators. I have not had much experience with Boxes or virt-manager, I was so use to using VirtualBox that I never had a reason to try an alternative.

 

Since discovering that Fedora 18 standard GNOME installation came with Boxes, I thought I would try it out on my minimal installation guide which worked great so I thought I'll share how I configured my boxes setup in case others choose to go down this path with testing out other operating systems.

 

This will not be a complete guide to the features it provides, but just a guide to how to install an operating system on Boxes. I am using Fedora 18 to install gnome-boxes as well as going to be installing Fedora 18 DVD in gnome-boxes as I have it already from my other tutorials that I did. You could use whatever Linux image you may have and hopefully have the same success I did.

 

All commands are done in terminal.

 

Installing gnome-boxes

 

To install gnome-boxes we run:

 

sudo yum -y install gnome-boxes

Once it's finished downloading and has installed itself we are ready to use it.

 

SELinux problems with Boxes gnome-boxes

 

It might be a good idea if everyone does this command, unless they have turned SELinux off.

 

SELinux can prevent the creation of boxes. If you get Box creation failed or Connection to "YourOS" failed. It can mean SELinux prevented Boxes.

 

To fix this do:

 

sudo setsebool -P virt_use_fusefs 1

This command can take some time to complete.

 

For those interested in discovering how this problem was found and the fix for it. I used the audit2why program from policycoreutils-devel package like:

 

sudo grep virt /var/log/audit/audit.log | audit2why

Which found the lines having problems, as well as suggesting the solution to fix it. This is usually how I find out if SELinux is preventing me. I do not believe in turning it off just to avoid the inconvenience, it's suppose to be another layer of protection.

 

Launching gnome-boxes

 

To launch gnome-boxes we run:

 

gnome-boxes &

Stepping Through The Wizard

 

Introduction

 

When you first run it you should be viewing the Introduction of the Create a Box. Click on the Continue button.

 

Source Selection

 

We should now be at the Source Selection screen that asks for you to Insert operating system installation media or select a source below. We will be choosing Select a file, since I have the ISO stored on my computer already. Navigate to where the ISO is, select it and then continue.

 

Depending on the type of ISO used and gnome-boxes understanding of the ISOs, it can skip a few steps here.

 

With the DVD, it is not live media. I get taken to the Setup screen in case I would like to choose an automated install (Express Install On) or whether I want to do the installation myself.

 

With Live media however, Boxes will usually skip to the review section because with Live media, you have a choice whether you want to install it or if you just want to check it out. You may only want to run the Live media instead of installing. You still have the option of installing it if you like but you'll do it in the same sense as if you booted the live media without using a virtual machine. So do not be alarmed if your next step is the Review and not the Setup, gnome-boxes is meant to make the process of installing operating systems as easy as possible.

 

Setup

 

In the Setup screen we are given the option to do an Express Install, which will set up the defaults for that operating system for you which you just need to provide a Username and Password and it'll configure it for you. I am not certain how it handles it for other operating systems, whether it's the same screen you'll get but with Fedora 18 DVD I can only say what I see about it.

 

I am going to turn off Express Install (I believe the defaults for Fedora 18 will give me a GNOME desktop), so that I can perform a minimal installation to speed this process up.

 

Review

 

The review screen shows what System it is creating, how much memory it is going to provide and also the size of the disk. You can customise it even further if you like but the defaults are fine with me. So the next step would be to go ahead with installing now.

 

Some Things To Know About Boxes

 

If you need to get the mouse out of being held by Boxes, press Ctrl+Alt together and you can now take the mouse outside and access your own desktop items.

 

In the top-left corner is an arrow [<] which when clicked minimises your virtual desktop, it does not pause the operation so whatever is happening can still continue.

 

In the top-right corner is an arrow pointing corner to corner, this is the fullscreen mode. To get out of fullscreen mode, move your mouse to the top of the screen and the panel will drop down and in the top-right corner will be an arrow pointing to a window, that gets you out of fullscreen back into a windowed mode.

 

The health/graph looking button is the properties settings for the current virtual machine you're running.

 

If you have problems with your virtual machine not responding, the easiest is to minimise your virtual desktop with the top-left button and then click on it again. I've noticed these things myself and that was the easiest way to solve it till they fix these bugs. Boxes is relatively new so issues may appear like these.

 

Shutting Boxes down without shutting down your OS, saves the current state of the OS so that you can resume back from where you left off. This is like the hibernate/suspend option.

 

Right-Clicking on the Boxes in the taskbar you can force shutdown.

 

Well I do not need to go through any more steps, the installation process is pretty much installing the operating system how you like and that is it.

 

When you next see gnome-boxes you will be able to just click on the virtual machine and it'll boot up or start up from a snapshot. You can also right-click on those virtual machines, select them and click the cross at the bottom of the screen to delete them if you no longer want to keep it. I haven't discovered what the heart is for, but I'll learn about it the more I use gnome-boxes.

 

Cheers,

 

MC

never heard of boxes (gnome boxes) before... great tute MC

To be honest I never heard of it before either but I saw it on a standard installation of Fedora 18 which got me curious about it. So this is really just me showing my curiosity with it and why I don't know what some of the features are, this just means I was too lazy to read the documentation on it but everyone should read them.Boxes is quite good and is at this stage OK if you are not doing anything too dramatic like I'm trying to do. I am having a lot of trouble at this stage with going from minimal install (works perfect) then installing GNOME 3 as the desktop to start in (can't get graphical mode), because I'm not too familiar with how Boxes really works, so I'm trying to compare the difference in setup between my minimal install and my graphical install. So far I feel like I'm heading in the right direction, but still far from the mark but once I know how all the pieces fit together, it makes it easier to share how to do it.I already know how to install from minimal to GNOME 3 outside of a virtual machine but it is usually nice to be able to verify my steps again. Otherwise I have to rely on memory and I can definitely miss vital steps out because it all comes naturally when doing the process.At this stage, I still prefer VirtualBox but I have not tried minimal to gnome in this yet either, Boxes seems to be heavy on the resources and you can feel when it slowly gets unresponsive, still workable but delays in registering input from keyboard, etc. As I said Boxes is aimed at people who aren't system administrators, it easily does all the work for you. Which might be why it ain't suited for the steps I'm trying although I don't even think if I used virt-manager it would make any difference because I still need to understand how qemu/kvm work which I don't have much experience on either.Cheers,MC

well keep us posted with your progress... and yes Virtualbox and VMware is still my Virtualization preference