Re: Importing VMs from Aqemu (and perhaps Virtualbox)

["Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)" <zeeshanak gnome org>]

Hi,

On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 8:52 PM, me <helloworld openmailbox org> wrote:
> Hello, I just discovered gnome-boxes and am quite impressed so far.

Glad to hear.

> However, I was wondering if I could get a bit of help importing my existing VMs from Aqemu and perhaps 
> Virtualbox. The Aqemu images are still in home/.aqemu but libvirt does not see them when I type 
> qemu://localhost into the URL field.

Images are not the same as VMs so it would be very wrong for libvirt
to use the images, especially automatically. A VM consists also of
metadata, e.g CPU configuration, RAM, etc

> I am unable to start Aqemu since upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04. It is a known bug. I am also unable/unwilling 
> to install Virtualbox, but I have backups of my images on an external drive if Boxes can use them.
>
> I am able to wrestle my pre-existing VMs on to Boxes one at a time by creating a new VM, C/P my existing 
> image over from home/.aqemu to home/.local/share/gnome-boxes/images, and then renaming the image file.
>
> This gets tedious as I have a number of VMs, and I would appreciate any hints on what I might be doing 
> wrong with my attempts at a mass import.

I must admit that mass import of images isn't something that we have
thought of. :( Maybe Boxes can allow you to specify a directory to
import from. Would that help? If so, please do file a bug about that.

We have this plans to support proper import/export through OVF format
and IIRC that format allows to export multiple VMs into a single file:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723008

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
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