[HowTo] Install QEMU/KVM on antiX

[Member rayluo]

Hi community,

Not sure how many community members here use QEMU/KVM to power their virtual machines. Presumably fewer than the VirtualBox users, because VirtualBox is readily available from antiX’s Package Installer, QEMU/KVM is not. It took me a while to figure out how to setup QEMU/KVM on antiX21, but now I have put my learning into one installation script, so that it would become just one click/command away to have “Virtual Machine Manager” available in your Applications menu.

Enjoy. By the way, a VM powered by QEMU/KVM is 20% faster than by VirtualBox. Nice to have those extra power at your fingertips. 🙂

[Anonymous]

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Thanks for sharing the script. I have a few questions regarding
authentication unavailable: no polkit agent available to authenticate action ‘org.libvirt.unix.manage’
mentioned within your installation script:

Does your script presume that one//all of the following are installed on the system?
(I checked and found that they are preinstalled in antiX 21 FULL edition, but are absent from Base edition)

gir1.2-polkit-1.0
libpolkit-agent-1-0
libpolkit-gobject-1-0
libpolkit-gobject-elogind-1-0

If missing, will they be automatically installed, as dependencies, when the following command is run?
sudo apt install qemu qemu-kvm libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system bridge-utils virt-manager libguestfs-tools -y

I am unsure whether “libpolkit-gobject-elogind-1-0” package is, in fact, necessary, but… should the installation script test whether the needed polkit -related packages are present on the system?

[Member olsztyn]

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rayluo wrote:

Enjoy. By the way, a VM powered by QEMU/KVM is 20% faster than by VirtualBox.

Thank you Rayluo for the KVM installation process. I was actually planning to install and such script will come in handy…
In reference to the quoted statement:
KVM appears to be more efficient virtual engine, however not as user friendly. The way I understand also integration with host hardware is limited, such as mouse, USB and video. Is this still correct to say, or my info is too outdated?
Thanks again…

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Moderator christophe]

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Thanks you this, rayluo.
I’m playing with it now….

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

[Member rayluo]

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Anonymous wrote:

Does your script presume that one//all of the following are installed on the system?
(I checked and found that they are preinstalled in antiX 21 FULL edition, but are absent from Base edition)

gir1.2-polkit-1.0
libpolkit-agent-1-0
libpolkit-gobject-1-0
libpolkit-gobject-elogind-1-0

I should have mentioned that I use antiX full version exclusively, so, all my scripts were only developed from, and tested on antiX full version. (Aside: this forum does not seem to allow me to modify my old post. Otherwise I would clarify that in my first post above.)

Anonymous wrote:

If missing, will they be automatically installed, as dependencies, when the following command is run?
sudo apt install qemu qemu-kvm libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system bridge-utils virt-manager libguestfs-tools -y

As mentioned above, I haven’t tested it with antiX base version. Perhaps you can just go ahead and try it. If some of them are indeed necessary, let me know, I can add it into my script.

olsztyn wrote:

KVM appears to be more efficient virtual engine, however not as user friendly. The way I understand also integration with host hardware is limited, such as mouse, USB and video. Is this still correct to say, or my info is too outdated?

I am still a fairly new KVM user (that installation script was the byproduct of my first encounter of KVM during my weekend hobby project). So, just take my opinion with a grain of salt. My understanding is the QEMU/KVM was originally developed as a lower level infrastructure (fwiw, kvm is a Linux kernel module), which provides better performance, but traditionally only available with command-line interface (CLI). That CLI might be considered as “less user friendly”? But my installation script also installs a GUI “Virtual Machine Manager” into your Start menu. With that GUI, I’d say its user friendness is comparable to Virtualbox.

And, once your VM is up and running, the mouse and video/audio all work well. I did not have a chance to test any other USB devices (other than the mouse), though. That being said, I haven’t figured out to use USB external storage on Virtualbox, either. So, to me, QEMU/KVM is not worse than Virtualbox in this regard.

[Moderator christophe]

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I use antiX base, generally, so I was able to check.
gir1.2-polkit-1.0 & libpolkit-agent-1-0 are not installed as dependencies. The other 2 listed above are installed on my “base” antiX system, after running your install script.

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

[Member olsztyn]

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Attempted to install and ran into conflict right on the first part. It appears to require sysvinit while I am running runit antix21. I will try to figure out what needs to be changed…
“The following packages have unmet dependencies:
runit-core-services-antix : Conflicts: initscripts but 2.96-7 is to be installed
Conflicts: initscripts:i386
runit-init-antix : Conflicts: sysvinit-core but 2.96-7 is to be installed
sysvinit-core : Depends: sysvinit-utils (>= 2.86.ds1-66)
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.
“

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by olsztyn.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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The problem is with libguestfs-tools

apt install libguestfs-tools 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 runit-core-services-antix : Conflicts: initscripts but 2.96-7 is to be installed
                             Conflicts: initscripts:i386
 runit-init-antix : Conflicts: sysvinit-core but 2.96-7 is to be installed
 sysvinit-core : Depends: sysvinit-utils (>= 2.86.ds1-66)
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Member olsztyn]

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anticapitalista wrote:

The problem is with libguestfs-tools

Thanks for identifying the issue. Is there any workaround?
Thanks and Regards…

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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olsztyn wrote:

Thanks for identifying the issue. Is there any workaround?
Thanks and Regards…

No idea.

Is libguestfs-tools really required?

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Member olsztyn]

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anticapitalista wrote:

Is libguestfs-tools really required?

Great question that appears to solve this issue…
I just checked on my the second best Linux distro (right after antiX, of course) where I have kvm installed (it was actually an option during OS installation process), which (kvm/qemu) seems to work fine and at firs sight libguestfs-tools appear to not be installed…
Thanks for the tip!

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Member olsztyn]

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Just reporting progress:
KVM/QEMU completed all setup successfully and appears to start fine per process outlined by rayluo, omitting libguestfs-tools from the installation.
This is on antiX 21 Runit.

Thanks rayluo for the process outline, which has all the necessary pieces in one place and thanks anticapitalista for the tip.
Great to see KVM on antiX as well, which might be the best suited to run such VM infrastructure due to minimal memory footprint…

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by olsztyn.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Moderator christophe]

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Well, my initial testing is on my 32-bit core duo laptop on antiX-21.

And it is INFINITELY faster than virtualbox, because…

…vitualbox dropped 32-bit support, since antiX-19! 😉

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by christophe.

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

[Member rayluo]

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olsztyn wrote:

anticapitalista wrote:

Is libguestfs-tools really required?

Great question that appears to solve this issue…
I just checked on my the second best Linux distro (right after antiX, of course) where I have kvm installed (it was actually an option during OS installation process), which (kvm/qemu) seems to work fine and at firs sight libguestfs-tools appear to not be installed…
Thanks for the tip!

Good to know that libguestfs-tools is not strictly required.

Like I said, I am still new in this area. That “part 1” of my script – including that libguestfs-tools – was initially copied from somewhere else, aiming to run some particular docker image. I did not reach that far. The “part 2” was a byproduct when I attempted troubleshooting on part 1.

On a close look, the libguestfs-tools is only used for this purpose: “libguestfs is a set of tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine (VM) disk images.” So, as long as your normal operations do not reach that territory, I think it would be fine to skip libguestfs-tools.

olsztyn wrote:

Great to see KVM on antiX as well, which might be the best suited to run such VM infrastructure due to minimal memory footprint…

christophe wrote:

my initial testing is on my 32-bit core duo laptop on antiX-21.

And it is INFINITELY faster than virtualbox, because…

…vitualbox dropped 32-bit support, since antiX-19! 😉

That is a good point. 😀 It would be great if antiX’s package installer would provide KVM as an alternative option, alongside with VirtualBox.

[Member PPC]

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If this does work (as it seems it does), maybe this script could be addapted and added to Package Installer (along with a simple GUI for QEMU, there are some available).
A mini tutorial on how to use qemu (to launch .iso’s, to launch cd/dvd’s and install to a virtula disk) is available here: https://linux-tips.com/t/booting-from-an-iso-image-using-qemu/136

I got this error on the very last part of the script (on antiX 19.X 64bits, sysv):

[....] Starting DNS forwarder and DHCP server: dnsmasq
dnsmasq: failed to create listening socket for port 53: Address already in use
 failed!
invoke-rc.d: initscript dnsmasq, action "start" failed.

P.

Edit:
I tried to test qemu by running antiX’s iso in VM. I only got this:

qemu-system-x86_64 -boot d -cdrom ~/antiX-21_386-full.iso -m 1024
VNC server running on ::1:5900

qemu-system-i386 -boot d -cdrom ~/antiX-21_386-full.iso -m 1024
Got me the same result.

qemu-system-x86_64    -boot d \
                      -cdrom ~/antiX-21-b2-runit_x64-full.iso \
                      -m 1024 \
                      -curses

Shows, for a fraction of a second, a “seabios” text then switches to 800×600 empty screen and stops.

The terminal didn’t freeze, but nothing happened… Long ago I used to test iso’s with qemu this way… Am I missing something?

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by PPC.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by PPC.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by PPC.

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