On 1/7/25 21:15, Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote:
These packages were pointed out to me a while back as a possible alternative to virtualbox. While doing a bit of work on the new machine, I did a quick search using both of those terms in Synaptic Package Manager, also updating a couple of files and installing one other package. These searches each returned a nonntrivial list of packages, but none of them was named kvm or qemu, so I must be missing something here. Can any of you guys help me out? I'm not averse to other tools, like apt, etc. if that's preferable...
My list of packages that I use for installing virt-manager and KVM/QEMU is: - qemu-system-x86 # the base - bridge-utils # for bridged networking - libvirt-daemon libvirt-daemon-system # basic libvirt - virt-viewer virt-manager libvirt-clients # libvirt tools - spice-client-gtk # SPICE for display driver Some of the packages might be drawn in as dependencies for virt-manager, but I just play safe.
A pointer to any documentation on these so I can get a good idea of how to set it up would also be helpful.
In addition to the links by Jeff the Debian wiki: <https://wiki.debian.org/libvirt> This has some more links. One hint to virt-manager/libvirt: make sure to use "qemu://system" as connection, not "qemu://session". To make sure the "virsh" command uses this automatically, create a file "$HOME/.config/libvirt/libvirt.conf" with a single line: uri_default = "qemu:///system" And make sure to add your user to the group "libvirt"! And if you want to run inside guests licensed programs that hash the hardware, be aware that the emulated hardware changes occasionally and old hardware isn't supported anymore. . On my trixie/sid system this caused recently my Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2016 to tell me that I have to re-license the software. So I installed KVM/QEMU inside a KVM/QEMU guest with bookworm and started a backup image, and everything was fine again. Nested virtualization with KVM/QEMU works nicely. For the first VM I used CPU passthrough, for the second the CPU and hardware that I defined when I originally setup the VMs. Now I also have KVM/QEMU inside of an LXC container running as I decided this will be less overhead, but it's much harder to get it running. At some time I'll try to get KVM/QEMU running inside a docker container, as this will be even less overhead, but I haven't started this yet. Detlef
