From time to time I want to run a virtual machine on my computer, a sandbox containing another operating system with some programs running in total isolation. Under Linux my answer for this need is a set of three components:
- KVM – a virtualization module in the Linux kernel that allows the kernel to function as a hypervisor. (Wikipedia)
- QEMU – a machine emulator and virtualizer that can perform hardware virtualization. It can cooperate with KVM to run virtual machines at near-native speed (Wikipedia)
- Virtual Machine Manager – a nice GUI to use above things as simply as possible.
Problem
How prepare all above components on a fresh installation of Linux Mint 20.1?
Solution
This solution is based on the article “Install KVM Virtualization on Linux Mint 20” with my additions.
First execute following commands:
sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-daemon-system libvirt-clients bridge-utils virt-manager sudo adduser $USER libvirt sudo adduser $USER kvm sudo adduser $USER libvirt-qemu
Here the above-mentioned article claimed everything is ready and working. But it wasn’t in my case. So just restart Linux now. Then proceed with verification steps:
virsh -c qemu:///system list
The output should be:
Id Name State --------------------
Then execute:
systemctl status libvirtd.service
The output should start with following lines:
● libvirtd.service - Virtualization daemon
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/libvirtd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Wed 2021-02-03 22:54:41 CET; 31s ago
Then start Virtual Machine Manager. It should show that it is connected to KVM/QEMU. It should look like this:
Now it’s ready.
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Hello
To share the libraries such as copy/paste, devices, folders, etc, from the virtualized machine wath the main system, what else should I do?
Greetings
This works except all I had to do was “sudo apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-daemon-system libvirt-clients bridge-utils virt-manager”, reboot, and it just worked.
@ Dero ; I had the same issue and while I suspect it’s possible to get other methods working I just setup a basic Samba share on the host Mint 20 machine and then from the Windows (Win10) virtual machine I just did the following (without the “) on the section you can type stuff in bottom left area of screen… “\\192.168.1.100\” (or whatever is the IP of the machine running Samba) and it showed the folder name I was sharing and I select it and it just worked (since I did not setup any username/password stuff anyone on my network can access that share straight up). because trying to setup a more standard way of sharing seems more difficult on this QEMU/KVM than in VirtualBox.