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
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- Using cgit
- Making cgit Pretty
- Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
- 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
- On Alliances from Smashing Frames
- Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
- Diffusion of Responsibility from Smashing Frames
- My AI Adoption Journey from Mitchell Hashimoto
- Fedora Magazine: Contribute to Fedora 44 KDE and GNOME Test Days from Fedora People
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Pluralistic: The web is bearable with RSS (07 Mar 2026)
Today's links The web is bearable with RSS: And don't forget "Reader Mode." Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Eyemodule x Disneyland; Scott Walker lies; Brother's demon-haunted printer; 4th Amendment luggage t…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow March 7, 2026Using Clankers to Help Me Process Surgery
At 4 AM in recovery, the machines that never sleep turned out to be exactly the right company.
via Xe Iaso's blog March 7, 2026Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter.
via matduggan.com March 6, 2026Generated by openring