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KVM, virt-manager and God’s gift to slackers.

KVM, virt-manager and God’s gift to slackers.

I got to a point on Thursday of this week when I was seriously considering throwing Slackware out and starting life over with CentOS. I have been trying, off and on, for weeks to get a working implementation of KVM and optionally "virt-manager".

I have laboriously downloaded, compiled and installed SlackBuild package after SlackBuild package. I have traced dependencies, I have discovered a variety of lists, I have found recommendations, bug reports and gotchas, for hour after hour. I removed, rebuilt, reordered and replaced packages that ultimately failed after showing initial promise, until I was ready to cry.

Then I saw the comment "but do yourself a favour and check out sbopkg" together with an appropriate link. I did and my life has been changed. It’s a revelation, an epiphany, a gift from God, Chess Griffin and Mauro Giachero. Why have I not known about sbopkg for years?

Sadly installing virt-manager still doesn’t work out of the box, but sbopkg makes it simple to delete everything, reconfigure, rebuild and install with handful of key strokes and then get on with something else while it handles the prerequisites (or at least those it knows about) downloads, compiles and installs.

This is my modified queue file for working virt-manger. When the dependencies are resolved it expands to this.

I now have a working KVM/virt-manager installation but I doubt I would ever have got there with without "sbopkg".

/s-1Clifford W Fulford
14 March 2015./s+2