Using Virt-Manager on Debian
Virt-Manager is an awesome front end for running QEMU VMs on top of KVM. This is a great alternative to VirutalBox and since the latest version of Virtualbox has been moved to the “contrib” section in Debian (due to a non-free compiler that is required to builds the BIOS) it is one of the only 100% free software GUIs for managing virtual machines. To get virt-manager working debian you will need the following:
apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin virt-manager
Could not access KVM kernel module: Permission denied failed to initialize KVM: Permission denied
user:group is defined in /etc/libvirtr/qemu.conf 1 by default this is nobody so this is why the error message occurs. In order to fix this, edit this file and add your username and group to this file. The file should end up looking something like this:# The user for QEMU processes run by the system instance. It can be 215 # specified as a user name or as a user id. The qemu driver will try to 216 # parse this value first as a name and then, if the name doesn't exist, 217 # as a user id. 218 # 219 # Since a sequence of digits is a valid user name, a leading plus sign 220 # can be used to ensure that a user id will not be interpreted as a user 221 # name. 222 # 223 # Some examples of valid values are: 224 # 225 # user = "qemu" # A user named "qemu" 226 # user = "+0" # Super user (uid=0) 227 # user = "100" # A user named "100" or a user with uid=100 228 # 229 #user = "root" 230 user = "username" 231 # The group for QEMU processes run by the system instance. It can be 232 # specified in a similar way to user. 233 #group = "root" 234 group = "groupname"
systemctl restart libvirtd.service
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- Lev Lazinskiy
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- Convert Markdown to PDF in Sublime Text
- Making cgit Pretty
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The social contract of writing from jola.dev
- My Running Tips from Kevin Bell's Blog
- tweet from Derek Sivers blog
- Rewrote my blog with Zine from Drew DeVault's blog
- A eulogy for Vim from Drew DeVault's blog
- Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
- Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
tweet
India tech friends: I just bought my ticket to IndiaFOSS in BLR Sept 26-27: https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/2026 Want to meet? Email me: https://sive.rs/contact
via Derek Sivers June 12, 2026Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
After two days of experience with Claude Fable 5 I think the best way to describe it is relentlessly proactive. It knows a whole lot of tricks and it will deploy pretty much any of them to get to its goal. I'll illustrate this with an example. I was hackin...
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries June 11, 2026“Must hate yourself to submit”
I linked to a bunch of speedrunning videos before, but this 43-minute video by hbomberguy from 2018 is a good introduction to the whole concept and why people care: It’s really funny, romantic (maybe a bit too romantic), and it has a few great examples and...
via Unsung June 11, 2026Generated by openring