Open brainchild0 opened 1 year ago
Yes, this can be made available in GNOME Boxes (including non-flatpak version). For now, you can follow the steps below to achieve this.
GNOME Boxes (flatpak) stores all its per-user config and data in /home/$USER/.var/app/org.gnome.Boxes/
as shown below:
$ cd ~/.var/app/org.gnome.Boxes/
$ ls -l
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 8 sid sid 4096 Dec 22 20:39 cache
drwxr-xr-x 6 sid sid 4096 Dec 21 20:48 config
drwxr-xr-x 3 sid sid 4096 Dec 21 20:05 data
Primary among those are:
data - VM Disk images are stored in dir data/gnome-boxes/images/
config - libvirt config is stored in dir config/libvirt/
config - gnome-boxes config is stored in dir config/gnome-boxes/
You have 2 options:
/shared/
dir ) which is accessible to all users and symlink to the dirs listed above, and specify --filesystem=/shared/
as argument to flatpak run
command.user2
and shutdown after ISO boot ( without doing the full install ), and edit the config to point to the disk image of user1
( as shown below ):E.g. If you want to share a debian-12 VM created by user1
with user2
, login to user2
and create a VM with debian-12 ISO image. When the ISO install boot menu is displayed, shutdown the VM.
Run the following commands in user2
session:
$ flatpak run --command=sh --devel org.gnome.Boxes//stable
You are now inside the gnome-boxes
flatpak env. Now get the list of all VMs created by user2
$ virsh list --all
Now, edit the config to point to the debian-12 disk image from user1
home dir.
$ virsh edit debian-12-vm # VM name from above command
This would require that disk image dir permissions be adjusted accordingly.
I am not experienced in the details of FlatPak, and realize that applications operate with very particular limitations in system access.
Yet, I have wondered whether it would be possible for the FlatPak distribution of Boxes to support the creation and use of VMs that are accessible to all users on a system, rather than storing the images and manifest beneath the user's home.