14 DAY TRIAL // As we’ve reported earlier today, the GNOME development team is hard at work to bring you the latest GNOME 3.16 desktop environment, due for release on March 25, 2015. GNOME Boxes, the default virtualization software of GNOME based on QEMU, will also be part of the forthcoming release of the graphical environment, bringing a number of enhancements and new features. The first Beta version of GNOME Boxes 3.16 is now available for testing.
The first thing users will see when opening the GNOME Boxes application on their brand-new GNOME 3.16 upgrade is a new cool welcome screen that will offer a unique experience, which replaces the old intro page from the first time wizard. In addition, step titles will now be displayed instead of numbers in the wizard’s titlebar.
The GNOME Boxes UI receives numerous improvements
Several other UI improvements have been done in the Beta release of GNOME Boxes 3.16, such as the ability to inform users about how to detach the keyboard grab, the titlebar will always have a title now, virtual machines will no longer be automatically saved when viewing or editing their properties, and normal entries are now displayed for editable string properties, replacing the old edit button.
The URL entry in the VM wizard received various improvements, such as the ability to provide auto-completion based on the media URLs that are identified by libosinfo, the "Continue" button will no longer be enabled for invalid URLs, expected URLs will now be better explained, and local URLs will be validated thoroughly now.
libvirt-based virtual machines can now be imported
Moreover, snapshot naming has been improved and it now works correctly, automated UI tests have been added, proper accessible name has been set on all windows, libvirt-based virtual machines can now be imported. In addition, chmod disk will not be used if not required, so that the annoying policykit dialog won’t pop up, the "Empty location" issue on VM importing has been repaired, and network interface is now replaced in order for the imported virtual machine to start successfully.
Last but not least, several translations have been updated in the GNOME Boxes 3.16 Beta release, including Spanish, Czech, Hebrew, Russian, Slovak, Norwegian Bokmal, and Hungarian. Of course, a number of other minor fixes and improvements have been applied to the user interface. Download GNOME Boxes 3.16 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia, while keeping in mind that it’s only an unstable release which should not be deployed on production machines.