How to Install Virtmanager in Arch Linux

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 14:59:15 +0200

Useful links
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Arch Wiki entry: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Virt-manager

What is Virtmanager?
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First of all: This will be a somewhat shorter guide, as it only covers the installation. You will need a few things for this. But now back to the question: What is Virtmanager? Virtmanager is a Type 2 hypervisor based on KVM. Technically, it could also be classified as a Type 1 hypervisor because it supports hardware passthrough. However, I went into more detail about this in the guide to virtualization and containerization.

https://xenoelectronics.com/posts/2025/virtualization-vs-containerization/

How do you install Virtmanager?
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To install VirtManager, you need a few packages.

Let’s start with the packages.

Pacman packages
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First, we should update, which can be done with this command.

sudo pacman -Syu

Then these packages must be installed:

sudo pacman -S virt-manager virt-viewer qemu-full vde2 ebtables dnsmasq bridge-utils libvirt openbsd-netcat ebtables iptables libguestfs

Start Libvirt
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Libvirt must be running in order to enable virtualization. To do this, simply enter the following commands:

sudo systemctl start libvirtd.service

sudo systemctl enable libvirtd.service

sudo systemctl start libvirtd.socket

sudo systemctl enable libvirtd.socket

Now you can use VirtManager, but you can do even more, such as hardware passthrough with GPU or PCIe devices. However, there will be another guide for this, as it deserves its own entry.

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How to Install Virtmanager in Arch Linux

Useful links #

What is Virtmanager? #

How do you install Virtmanager? #

Pacman packages #

Start Libvirt #

Services from XenoElectronics #