I want to try out some of the COSMIC builds, but I don’t want to rebase just yet. What is the recommended setup for running full, fat virtual machines?
The simplest way is to install Boxes from Software Center or from terminal:
flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Boxes
Either use boxes from the Discover App Store or you can rebase to Aurora-DX and get virtual machine manager for KVM VMs. Boxes is a bit more limited but for quick-testing VMs it’s fine in most cases.
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I’m running Bluefin and recently installed a Windows 10 VM in Boxes without issue once virtualization was enabled in the UEFI. One quirk of Boxes is that it will attempt to use all the threads of your CPU. It gives you the option to adjust storage and memory, but not CPU threads during setup. After setting up you’ll need to right-click on the VM, go into preferences, and allocate the number of threads there.
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OK, I had installed qemu and libvirt via brew (as I thought Boxes needed them) and tried the experimental ISOs. Those blew up spectacularly so I am installing Silverblue 40 via the Boxes interface and will rebase afterwards to test.
I doubt this is true and needed. Brew installs app in its own OCI-type container and flatpak installs app in its own OCI-type container (probably better “sandbox”). Two containers that do not see each other (at least not by default).
That’s why I removed them.
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New bit of fun. 3d acceleration doesn’t work with Nvidia in Boxes. Any thoughts (excluding switching gpus)?
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I run Blufin in virtual machine… so can’t test this. Have you look at this post:
https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/gnome-boxes/3d-acceleration.html
Maybe you will have more luck asking for help in upstream forums. Boxes runs as flatpak, so it should not be anything specific for Blufin.
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Thanks for posting that. Didn’t know it had been addressed.
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It hasn’t.
I see the little switch and it is active.
I enable the little switch.
I launch the box, and it crashes.
I do this with any box and said box fails to launch.
I disable the switch and the boxes will launch.
Do you have an example with an Nvidia GPU?
Not sure if it’s nvidia issue, Boxes was flakey to set up. You can see in terminal I had to kill it a few times.
What I had to do was start the image and let it install, then shut down the image, right-click it and set preferences. And I had to it a couple times for it to take.
But after I got it working its been rock solid.
I am starting to think that there is a fundamental flaw here. The OS I am using was originally an all AMD system. I was gifted a much better Nvidia GPU and switched over via rebase. That went smoothly enough. However, I have been witnessing evidence that the rebase did not modify certain subsystems. I installed an application in an Arch distrobox and I noticed that the pkgbuild was installing AMD rocm graphics as a dependency, which is odd. Building this app in a VM worked as expected.
As a test, I will back up my personal data and nuke/repave my workstation to a clean build of bluefin-nvidia and see if that makes a difference.
The containers and the system are decoupled. The containers are managed separately. You likely need to destroy your existing containers and recreate them with the --nvidia flag for them to pick up the host changes.
I’d be interested in seeing the results, not sure the details of your setup. It’d probably depend on the individual images you’re using.
Ummm, I just use box buddy to set up my distroboxen. I don’t see how to set that flag in there.
EDIT: Turns out box buddy auto detects Nvidia. I have confirmed this. Now I am going to rebuild the app (orca-slicer).
Turns out that in order to get orca-slicer to work via distrobox, I had to download the Ubuntu 24.04 version of the appimage, then create an Ubuntu 24.04 distrobox, and then run the appimage from inside the distrobox. Works now.