Contributing to GNOME Boxes


GNOME Boxes  is used to view, access, and manage remote and virtual machines. Currently it is able to do either express-installations on a downloaded ISO or to download an ISO and offer the option to express-install it.

I stumbled upon the project ‘Improve GNOME Boxes express-installations by adding support to tree-based installations’, it required the knowledge of Object Oriented programming and I had done this course last semester only and had a project for the course. Even though I had used Java primarily for the project, it didn’t take me long to understand Vala. I quickly jumped into the irc channel of GNOME Boxes, introduced myself to the mentors(one of them being Felipe Borges), got the source code and built it. Initially it took me some time to understand how things were working but the mentors were patient enough to even answer my dumbest queries. I then started working on a few bugs, they helped me understand the front-end part of the project. I’ve fixed around 6 issues till now and am now working on understanding how the back-end works, mainly how we use libosinfo to get certain information about operating systems, hypervisors and the (virtual) hardware devices they can support.
Happy Coding :)

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