Gnome Boxes and Modern.ie

If you need to test Internet Explorer and all you have is a linux machine you might be disappointed when you see that modern.ie only offers VirtualBox images for linux. Fortunately, it is easy to use these images with QEMU and Gnome Boxes if you so desire.

1. Download the appropriate VirtualBox image.
2. Extract the .ova image
3. Open as disk (use Archive Mounter) and copy the *.vmdk file to your hard drive.
4. In Gnome Boxes, create a new vm and select the .vmdk file.
5. Start the VM and uninstall the Virtual Box Guest Additions
6. Install the Windows Guest tools from spice-space.org
7. At this point you are good to go and it is a good time to take a snapshot.

Gnome Boxes does not give you a lot of detailed settings to fiddle with. For the most part this is fine, but if you find yourself wanting to install more Virt-IO drivers (such as those found here) you will need to install Virtual Machine Manager to actually select the devices.