GNOME Boxes is a neat little app which makes using and managing virtual machines a treat for the sysops uninitiated, perfect for those who find themselves wanting to leverage the fruits of hypervisors without the hassle of man pages and config files.
Silly titles aside, there’s a good use case for a feature presently
absent from Boxes: If you were hoping to remotely deploy a VM for someone
to use within Boxes, you’re out of luck as (at the time of writing)
there’s no remote interface that libvirt supports which allows accessing
a user’s session. The obvious solution then (besides submitting a patch
to fix libvirt’s deficiency) would be to point Boxes at a URI which can
be accessed remotely. Only, a quick search through the menus and in
dconf-editor produces no config values which might aid us in our quest.
A poke around Boxes’ source reveals the following file:
➜ ~ cat /usr/share/gnome-boxes/sources/QEMU_Session [source] name=QEMU Session type=libvirt uri=qemu+unix:///session save-on-quit=true
Changing the uri field of that file to qemu+unix:///system should
net you a nice and dirty fix. If not, a quick
rm ~/.cache/gnome-boxes/sources/QEMU\ Session should do the trick
nicely.
Happy hacking!