If you read any of my previous blog entries, you must be now familiar with this 'express installation' concept we have in Boxes. Its pretty neat actually, you just set a few options at the beginning and then you can leave Boxes (or your machine) and when you are back, everything is setup for you automatically in a new box. I have invested a lot of time/efforts on this already and will be spending a lot more time in future as well but I am just one man so can not possibly cover all operating systems out there. That is why I am asking for help from anyone who will be interested in adding express installation support for Ubuntu and Debian while I focus on Fedora and Windows variants. Oh and if you are interested in adding support for some other distribution/OS, that contribution will also be more than welcomed. In any case, happy hacking!

Yesterday we rolled out the second release of Boxes for upcoming GNOME 3.3.3. There are many fixes/improvements in this release to list them all here but the most significant ones in my opinion are: A nicer UI for deletion of Boxes designed for protecting the user from accidental deletion of boxes. Here is a video demo of it in action. Special handling of 'live' and unknown media: Quick launch of a temporary box for it, which is made permanent automatically (only) if anything is installed on the box by the media. Here is a video demo of this behaviour in action. Express installation for Windows XP now works, thanks to important clues provided by Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues. Don't believe me? I have video footage that proves it. UI for setting user and administrator password and in case of older Windows, ability to set product key as part preparation for express installation. Please check out the videos above for demo of this feature in action. Apart from change

Dear readers! If you recall, in a blog post not so long ago I introduced you to the wonderful virtual world I now live in.  Now around the same time I wrote that post, some of the GNOME designers and developers (myself included) felt the need for having a UI as an integral part of GNOME that lets users easily manage (create and destroy) virtual machines and at the same time lets them connect to remote machines. Two of our awesome designers, Jon McCann and Jakub Steiner ) started creating design for this UI. We (as in Jon McCann) named it 'Boxes' as its something that deals with..hm.. boxes. At the same time, we (me, Marc-Andre and Christophe ) kept working on the foundations for Boxes, mainly in the form of lots of improvements to libvirt, libvirt-glib, libosinfo and spice-gtk. About less than a month ago we started implementing the design when the design stabilized a bit. The implementation actually started as a "proof of concept" from Marc-Andre o

Forgot to mention in my last blog post that SPICE is not just more efficient at network bandwidth utilization but is also much more faster/responsive. Also, Jon Nordby pointed out that the screenshots of virt-manager I copied from virt-manager website are several years outdated. Here is how the main UI looks like now a days. P.S. I was going to inline this screenshot but blogger.com is not letting me do that. :(

About two months ago I informed  the followers of this blog that I will now be working on SPICE project  for Red Hat . Judging from the questions I was asked after that, I realized that not many people know about SPICE so I thought I write at least one blog entry dedicated to explaining what SPICE is all about. Before I get to SPICE itself, let me first introduce you to the world SPICE lives in. Virtualization and Virtual Machines (VMs) For some reason, I feel that I should leave the definitions to wikipedia  and only quote it so that is what I am going to do: " Virtualization, in computing, is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources. " " A virtual machine (VM) is a "completely isolated operating system installation within your normal operating system".Today, this is implemented by either software emulation or hardware virtualization ". V

Ever since I blogged about me looking for opportunities outside Nokia , I was contacted by quite some companies. Some of them ended-up giving me nice offers but in the end the offer that stood out amongst all was from Red Hat . So last evening, I accepted their offer to join the awesome Spice team. The reasons I chose Red Hat over others were: Red Hat being undoubtedly the leader in Open Source technologies for more than a decade has always been on my 'awesome places to work at some day' list. The Spice project that I'm being hired to work on is simply awesome. They offer good working conditions. I'll be staying in Finland and most likely working from home (unless I'm asked to work at the Espoo office). I will be officially joining Red Hat on May 2 and my last day at Nokia will be on April 21. Before you ask, nothing disastrous is going to happen to GUPnP and Rygel . Of course I won't be spending as many hours on these projects as now but keeping in m