NixOS + Virt-Manager + Windows 11 = easy?

[@iusecurity]

Damn this saving me. You should write it on the nixos community

[@Becoming-Human]

Thank you for making this video. This is very helpful. Would you consider doing a future video where you show how to dedicate your iGPU to your laptop and your dGPU to your Windows 11 VM? The use case would be to be able to play games in the Windows 11 VM with a dedicated graphics card. Thank you. :-)

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

I would love to do that but sadly I do not use a laptop with a dedicated GPU so I can't verify that it works. I don't want to publish videos where I cannot verify by myself that it works

[@nickoct7472]

Thank you for making this video it not only shows me how to install virt-manager but a new way of compartmentalising different aspects of the system. some builds I don't want steam for example. It will make it easier to understand my configuaration.nix file. Thanks and merry christmas

[@HarryJarrell]

This tutorial really helped me a lot! One suggestion though, you need to figure out how to normalize the volume of your voice. When you start a sentence you are just about screaming and then your voice trails off to a very low volume. It is really kind of jolting to listen to.

[@DOSputin]

Thnx for the tips! Helped me to get this setup in my home-manager flakes. Cheers!

[@droydi]

Thank you for sharing this, very helpful.

[@bhavin3918]

This is a great video. It helped me to resolve my big trouble. Thanks for this video...😀

[@MeshVoid]

Awesome video! Getting into NixOS, really liked it's reproducibility, but as a 3d artist I'm forced to use 3 windows applications, as there's no official support for linux. I will try your method on my laptop and create a VM to run those pesky programs, if everything is fine will migrate my NixOS setup to my main work PC, really excited to be finally using gnome desktop env ob a daily basis! I just love gnome on linux and how snappy and fast it is, will try out running linux only if it works!

[@momomaniac1234]

Thank you 😀 i learned much from this video

[@MeshVoid]

I'm trying to use KVM and install Windows on a separate ssd drive, but the thing is, wherever you mount your drives KVM gives me the following error: Unable to complete install: ‘unsupported configuration: storage type ‘dir’ requires use of storage format >‘fat’’. It is always considering the mount drive to have a dir type, despite me changing file system types in my config. Any suggestions how to run VM on a separate ssd drive in nixos, am I doing something wrong?

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

It seems to be an issue with the backing file. Read through this bugzilla and there is an explanation as well as a workaround mentioned: bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1654763

[@MeshVoid]

@@TechSupportOnHold1 Hi there! The solution was trivial, I formatted the disk drive to a proper file system type and then pointed KVM to: dev/sdc1 where it was mounted by a system, not in any other location. And then I wrote my VM installation so that it would recognize the disk as a disk not a directory. Hopefully it will help someone )).

[@andreasschau4215]

Awesome! 😎

[@thecjester]

Thanks for the post, this is cool. Have you played with bridged networking in NixOS and Virt-Manager?

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

Not yet but this will be a future video for sure. Although currently I don't have the best equipment for network bridging (laptop...) So it's not the ideal situation to do stuff like that.

[@affieuk]

@@TechSupportOnHold1 +1 for this, when I tried bridging on my laptop, I got an error stating that my Intel ax210 wifi card doesn't support bridging. I assume this is a driver / firmware issue because I can do this just fine on Windows with Hyper-V. Also interesting that you selected OVMF_CODE and not the secureboot version, which I have seen in other videos as the recommended option.

[@breizil29]

Thank you

[@PhilKulak]

Thanks! How did you get win-virtio and win-spice installed in the VM? Did the graphics end up working nicely? Automatic resizing, all that?

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

I still didnt find a solution to get resizing etc to work from NixOS' side only to work. Inside the VM at this point you still have to install the virtio-win-guest-tools execution file github.com/virtio-win/virtio-win-pkg-scripts/blob/master/README.md Afterwards the window-resizing will be available right away.

[@PhilKulak]

@@TechSupportOnHold1 thanks!

[@anakinhyper5451]

@@TechSupportOnHold1 Wouldn't it be better before beginning to install hit the customization checkbox, add a new cd drive and load the win-virtio.iso there and then you can change the storage for the cqow2 file from sata to virtio? Doing so would enable during windows install to select the virtio driver instead of first using sata.... not sure if that has any effect later on.

[@ViperLarry-v7p]

Did that, but can't get the VM to have access to the internet. The NIC won't get installed. Virtual network and bridge virbr0 are definitely running though. Any idea ?

[@ViperLarry-v7p]

Nevermind, a US iso instead of a german ISO installs the NIC. Thanks anyway :)

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

I’m glad you figured it out

[@KaLiDEM]

Thanks for the video, helps a lot, I have a question, for some reason I cant chose Windows 11, the last one on the list is Windows 10, do yo know why ?

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

It might be related to me using nixos-unstable and nixpkgs-unstable channels and thus having a newer version of vier-manager available. There is a good chance that it might work for you anyways but nixos 23.05 should release soon and then will be available on stable, if you don’t want to move to unstable

[@KaLiDEM]

@@TechSupportOnHold1 I switch to unstable channel and now is working, Thanks @Tech Support On Hold

[@KaLiDEM]

@Tech Support On Hold I have another problem, when the windows 11 installation starts, the mouse and keyboard are not working, so I cant select Languaje and contionue with the installation. But the keyboard works if I go to the virtual machine BIOS, it is only a problem in windows installer. EDIT: Looks like Windows 10 works, but for some reason Windows 11 doesn't take the mouse and keyboard xD Thanks.

[@novaleary4488]

I did configured the VM as exactly as you did, but the Windows 11 installer still says that the computer doesn't meet the minimal specifications (most likely complaining about Secure Boot). In fact I check the boot menu and notice that Secure boot is in fact not enabled

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

Are you sure the following options are set? qemu = { swtpm.enable = true; ovmf.enable = true; ovmf.packages = [ pkgs.OVMFFull.fd ]; };

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

Also if you created the VM before you did set those settings and didn’t restart libvirtd (easiest to do via reboot) then it won’t work. Recommendation if you have set it the way I did is to reboot and then create a new VM. If this doesn’t work please let me know and I will try to help you.

[@novaleary4488]

@@TechSupportOnHold1 I have all the options enabled and I did restart the computer before trying to create the VM. I also gave it 2 cores and 2 threads with 8GB of ram and 128 storage.. unsure of what to do now. The thing I noticed is that virt-manager doesn't seem able to find the OVMF_CODE_SECBOOT.fd uefi image anymore (just shows the standard OVMF_CODE.fd one; while when I was running ArchLinux it showed both

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

You were right my apologies I’ll see what I can do about it

[@alexrno8l9ek27]

​@@TechSupportOnHold1I am also struggling with that. Any updates?

[@srghma]

tnx

[@Shise-]

Does this peform better than Gnome boxes?

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

Gnome boxes also uses the same underlying virtualisation technology. Overall the performance of virtual machines depends on your system specifications and how you set up the virtual machine itself

[@anakinhyper5451]

Unfortunately that does not work for me. Does the host also need to have secure boot enabled?

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

In what regard does it not work? The host does not need secure boot enabled. What error does it give you?

[@anakinhyper5451]

@@TechSupportOnHold1 Well, using unstable branch (upgraded today just in case) and after selecting the Windows Edition to install, I get the error that the requirements have not been fulfilled. I do see the TPM in the hardware listing and I see that it's using uefi OVMF but it does not seem to use the secure boot one. On the nixos host I don't have secure boot enabled. That should not matter I think.

[@anakinhyper5451]

Strange, I posted before pastebin to the xml file and image paste for the screenshot... it's gone...

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

That is weird, i havent removed anything on my comment-section, i guess youtube being youtube. I'll see what i can do for you on the configuration side of things@@anakinhyper5451

[@anakinhyper5451]

@@TechSupportOnHold1 I also think YT removed it.... still can't get it to work. Are you using Intel or AMD on the host? I think it might be because I use AMD (or because host does not have secure boot activated)

[@darkanastand]

Is there away for Gupta pass throughout

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

Sadly, I have no dedicated GPU thus I cannot test a working solution for you.

[@jeanrodrigues6249]

palavra para marido

[@kitastro]

thank you

[@TechSupportOnHold1]

You're welcome