Hello all, and to all you the best wishes for the New Year.
I am using Aurora in the Nvidia variation and I must say in almost 17 years of using Linux I never before had such a fantastic distro. It just works. With the automatic updates included I don’t need to do anything anymore with the OS, making me start to forget things, codes for example to get information about the system. But also those codes I don’t need to use because I know the system is just running. Great respect for the developers.
I have to add that I am a simple user with little demands. I have nothing layered because I don’t need those kind of programs, I don’t use containers because of the same reason. Just the plain OS which I installed using the ISO file, and a couple of Flatpak user programs. That’s all.
But, and here it comes, I would like to tinker with distro’s in a virtual machine. I know I can install Virtualbox or VMware but before using the immutable distro’s I did something using QEMU/KVM and would like to use that again.
How do I do that? How do I the setup? I read about doing it in Aurora-DX or several other Ublue distro’s but not in Aurora itself?
Do I need to use layering? Hope not, because before when I used Fedora Kinoite I did use layering and it was, by far, not as stable as is my Aurora now.
Is there a step-by-step instruction on how to start using QEMU/KVM, or can somebody here explain it to me? I would be very grateful.
Thanks and I hope I will get some good usable information so I can start tinkering again.
Thank you very much @j0rge. After a gazillion times typing in my password and 2 reboots I now have virtmanager working.
Now I can play again, thanks again.
I’m in the exact same position as JandeMus is. Just started to use Aurora and I’m amazed and very happy.
I would not consider myself a developer, but I need virtual machines every now and then (unfortunately also for some Windows stuff).
That’s the same for my family (65 year old father and so on), which I will bring to Aurora in a few months. They will also need a Windows VM for specific applications.
Enabling the full development environment seems a bit overkill.
@j0rge Would it maybe make sense and would it be doable, to ship libvirt with the base Aurora image (without all the dev tools)?
Virtual Machines seem quite basic
Hi there, what would be the usecase for virtual machines (for your parents etc.) - if you only need a basic VM with windows the Gnome Boxes flatpak might suffice nicely, but it does have some limitations. Otherwise I am thinking about bringing the virtualization packages to base aurora and people who want to use it can install the virt-manager flatpak/we preload that.
I would love for this to either be part of the base install or just an option with ujust. I am not developer and would have no use for the other tools in the dx release.
I gave up on Aurora the first time when testing it because I couldn’t get virt-manager to work. Back now though.
I haven’t tried Gnome Boxes yet. What are the limitations?
But it looks nice. Not KDE-nice, but easier to use for old people like my parents compared to libvirt.
For me personally (a bit more advanced than my parents ) I would probably still prefer QEMU/ KVM with libvirt, but I can understand if the personal desire of one individual cannot be accounted to.
The use cases are:
Parents:
the tax software they use for years is only available for Windows and MacOS
to lent out ebooks from the local library they are forced to use Adobe-ID which only runs on Windows and also the software from the proprietary software from the library itself
Girlfriend and Uncle
need to run Photoshop or Affinity for photo editing (GIMP doesn’t have the same capabilities and they cannot get used to the weird workflow of Gimp)
there is the chance that FreeCAD does not yet provide all required features and my uncle would need to run his professional CAD software on Windows then
I hope I didn’t forget anything, but I think these are all the uses I know as of now.
I tested Gnome Boxes today, but it does not support TPM 2.0 yet and the installation of Windows 11 as VM in Gnome Boxes fails, although it is working flawlessly with virt-manager.
I noticed that an old issue for failing win11 installations is still open after three years:
you can also try to get that Windows software running using Bottles (available as flatpak) and/or WinApps.
Bottles are based on Wine, WinApps run a full Windows VM in docker/podman/libvirt and are specifically tailored also for Adobe products.
There is a virt-manager flatpak but it currently doesn’t have qemu support, but it has been already PR’d.
Once that is merged and available we can have atleast virt-manager with VM support on the base image too and propably can get rid of those packages from -dx too
That would be great. I am not a developer, but I still use the aurora-dx image just because the virtual machine support built in. I needed to use iTunes in very rare occasions, and it’s totally botched on bottles.
) I would probably still prefer QEMU/ KVM with libvirt, but I can understand if the personal desire of one individual cannot be accounted to.