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
- Terminal RSS Reader With Nom
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The circus freaks of open source from Drew DeVault's blog
- Clanker: A Word For The Machine from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- I ran a half-marathon! from gluecko.se
- My Running Tips from Kevin Bell's Blog
- tweet from Derek Sivers blog
- My life was changed by four sentences in four books from Derek Sivers blog
- The world reveals itself to those who travel by foot from Escaping Flatland
- 45 things from Sean Voisen
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Sunday Steamy Sunday
Sunday Steamy Sunday I was supposed to get up and go birding this morning, but it was going to be 87F (28C) and very humid by the time we finished, so I'm here blogging from the comfort of my air-conditioned home instead. We planned on heading into Richmon...
via CHRISOD.ORG June 14, 2026Publishing WASM wheels to PyPI for use with Pyodide
The Pyodide 314.0 release announcement (via Hacker News) includes news I've been looking forward to for a long time: You can now publish Python packages built for Pyodide (or any Python runtime compatible with the PyEmscripten platform defined in PEP 783)...
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries June 13, 2026“They had the simplest task in the world.”
This is a really nice set of transitions when pinching in and out in Photos in iOS 26. This is trickier than it seems, because it’s not just a linear zoom (like it would be in Maps or Sketch, for example). It’s a zoom and reflow – from 3 items to 1 item pe...
via Unsung June 13, 2026Generated by openring