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How to Install Virtmanager in Arch Linux

·2 mins·
Guide Arch Linux Virtualization
Author
Author
Andreas
I’m Andreas – the person behind XenoElectronics. I’m not here to sell you buzzwords. I’m a hands-on Linux and Security admin who builds and documents systems. Whether it’s Docker, Ansible, Bash, or troubleshooting a broken NFS mount – if it’s in my docs, I’ve run it myself. I build, test, break, fix, and write it down – so others don’t have to waste time. Need help? Ask. If I’ve solved it before, you’ll get a quick answer.
Table of Contents
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Useful links#

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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