GNOME Boxes was initially introduced as
beta software in GNOME 3.3 (development branch for 3.4) as of Dec 2011, and as a preview release in GNOME 3.4. Its primary functions were as a virtual machine manager, remote desktop client (over
VNC), and remote filesystem browser, utilizing the
libvirt, libvirt-glib, and libosinfo technologies. This enabled the viewing of remote systems and virtual machines on other computers in addition to locally created virtual machines. Boxes possesses the ability to easily create local virtual machines from a standard
disk image file, such as an
ISO image while requiring minimum user input. As of version 40, the remote connection functionality has been moved to the separate application,
GNOME Connections. GNOME Boxes requires the CPU to support some form of
hardware-assisted virtualization (
AMD-V or
Intel VT-x, for example). ==People==