Re: Boxes (was Re: 3.4 Features, final round)

[Marc-André Lureau <marcandre lureau gmail com>]

Hi

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 9:00 AM, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> wrote:
> While Boxes look interesting, to me, it feels like it's "just" an
> application, and not a feature per se. And I'm not saying that in a
> negative way :-)

The new feature would be "easily manage virtual and remote machines".
Some GNOME designers are working on a set of mockups and interactions
for it. We think it makes sense to be able to create and use various
operating systems from the GNOME environment, as it is a common need
in both home and professional use cases, and it fits in the desktop to
desktop category.

"auto-run of bootable devices" is one of the feature we are trying to
bring (insert an Ubuntu DVD, and let it start, without rebooting or
leaving GNOME). It needs some integration from the lower-level and
through GNOME shell too (Zeeshan knows the details better).

Another feature that needs integration at the lower level is
USB-passthrough: plug your mobile and it shows up in the remote vm. We
have yet to come with a good UI proposal for that, but we already have
the lower level support for it. All it needs is a nice integration.

We have more ideas of integration with GNOME in the future:
transparent remote/vm applications, search accross vms, shared
storage, network, printers... All of this would need GNOME support in
various ways to be implemented correctly.

While Vinagre is a great application to connect to remote machine, it
is mostly limited to that, and would need a large rewrite to update
its style to the proposed mockups. This is something we have
considered seriously when we contributed to its Spice support a few
months ago. However, Boxes 3.4 goal is not to fully replace Vinagre.
It is indeed possible to connect remotely to spice and vnc servers.
However, it will lack notably rdp, ssh-proxy and reverse connections
support (unless the plans change or we receive some helps).

We will tell more about Boxes during its first release. At which point
I hope more people could try it thanks to jhbuild and some early
adopters.

regards

-- 
Marc-André Lureau