 I install and run a lot of virtual machines in my day-to-day testing of various Linux distributions as well as other operating systems as well on occasion. And my hypervisor of choice, you know, the program that actually serves up those virtual machines for me for many years was VirtualBox. I was a long time VirtualBox user for many, many, many years. And when I first started using VirtualBox, it was kind of bad. It was kind of clunky. And VirtualBox actually has matured very nicely over the last few years and has become a very easy way to quickly spin up virtual machines. And then I've been playing around with the last couple of years with Vert Manager. And Vert Manager is a KVM QEMU application. So these are virtual machines that use KVM, which uses the Linux kernel basically. So these VMs should be more performant, more responsive. But the problem with Vert Manager is that it was developed by Red Hat and they've kind of abandoned the project. They've actually abandoned it a couple of years ago. It has been deprecated and they're working on a new application to be a front-end for Libvert called Cockpit. And the reason I haven't really moved to Cockpit yet is because it's a different kind of program. Vert Manager is really just a standard desktop client. If I switch to my desktop, let me actually launch Vert Manager. And this is Vert Manager listing all of my VMs. I could click on one and start it and it would launch. I'm not going to start one of the VMs, but Cockpit is not a desktop client like that. It is a web client. You access it through a web browser. And it's really that way because you can access remote servers. You can create a remote web server, throw a bunch of VMs on that thing, right? And then on your local machine, in your web browser, you can access those VMs and start and stop those VMs and do whatever it is you need to do. Of course, you can do that on local host as well, which is what I've been playing around with today, is playing around with Cockpit on my local machine. For those of you wanting to check out Cockpit documentation, they do have a website that a website is cockpit-project.org. And it's kind of deep. You know, this is more kind of like enterprise kind of software. This is for IT guys, system administrators, right? Accessing remote virtual machines. It's not something most desktop users probably want to do. Really, it's not something I want to do. You know, I'm not going to use it that way. I just want all these VMs again on local host, but it really doesn't matter. You can have them locally stored on your machine or you can have them on a remote machine. And actually, you can have them on multiple remote servers and that can manage multiple servers at a time. It's actually pretty interesting software rating up on it. And you can see from the front page here, it's a standard kind of web interface website. You know, it shows graphs and, you know, various data that you need like CPU usage and RAM usage. Again, you can start and stop your VMs. Let me actually show you what you need to install to get cockpit running. And it's going to vary from distro to distro. Again, cockpit is developed by Red Hat. So it's probably going to work great on Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS. I don't know how well it's going to work on Ubuntu or Debian. They do develop versions for Ubuntu and Debian. They do have an Arch Linux version, but they say that is not really tested and not really supported, although they do package for Arch Linux. So it's possible that what I am seeing is not what you're going to see if you're using Debian and not what you're going to see if you're using Fedora and, you know, the program could have some differences depending on what Linux distribution you use. I'm going to switch to the desktop here. I'm going to show you exactly what packages you need to install here on Arch Linux to get cockpit working, at least what I needed to get it working for what I am doing. I used Paru because I don't know if some of these packages are going to be in the AUR or not. Of course, you can use Yay as your AUR helper. And of course, if these packages are in the standard Arch repositories, you can just do sudo pacman-capitalS, name of package. I had to install cockpit, of course. Then I also had to install this extra package, which seemed kind of strange that I needed this one, cockpit-machines. If you don't install this secondary package, it's like an extra module that runs inside cockpit. You won't have any kind of tab in your web interface that actually lists your virtual machine so you can't actually start and stop and manage your virtual machines. I would assume that's the main point of cockpit. I don't know why that's an extra module, but, you know, when I first installed cockpit, I did not actually install that package. I couldn't figure out where all my virtual machines were in the web interface. Then this is optional, but you kind of need it, PCP. This stands for performance co-pilot, and it just helps you get all your graphs and information as far as CPU and memory usage and all of that kind of data that cockpit is going to display for you. So I installed PCP. I also installed a package called cockpit-pcp. Then I also installed a package kit program package kit. I believe let's cockpit handle updates on the system. Because, again, you're typically using cockpit in remote servers. So you log into your remote server. You can actually update that server from cockpit if you have package kit installed. And then I also installed a program here locally, of course, VertViewer. And this actually allows me to view the virtual machine. I think VertViewer would only be necessary on the local machine just to view the VM that you want to take a look at. And once you have all of these installed, of course, that is not the end of it. You need to have some services running, for example, to get your performance co-pilot stuff, the PCP data and all of that working. You need to actually launch them as system deservices. So you need to do sudo, because you've got to be sudo to do anything like this. sudo, system, CTL, enable, and you need to enable cockpit. And then you also need to enable, I believe, PMCD, and then you also need to enable PMLogger. And that's 2G's in that. So PMCD, PMLogger, and of course you need to enable the cockpit service itself. And then once you have those enabled, then of course start the services as well. And then you need to open a browser. And I'm going to do this in Kube browser, because Brave, it's been the browser I've been using lately, but Brave blocks a lot of JavaScript and stuff. And I can tell you, cockpit does not like Brave. And I am going to hit O on the keyboard here in Kube browser to open. And I'm going to go to localhost colon 9090, because 9090 is the port for cockpit. And we get a login. On most distributions, you may actually have a logo for your distribution. I know you're in Fedora and Ubuntu. You'll get a logo saying what distribution, you know, because they're common server distributions. Obviously, Arco Linux is not a very common server distribution. And again, this is kind of enterprise kind of software, right? This is not something that most people will typically use. And then the user to log in can be any user that is a member of the Libvert group. You do need to make sure that you are a member of Libvert, I believe. I actually did not need to change my home user, my DT user to the Libvert group, because he was already a member, because of course I had Vert Manager installed on the system and been using Vert Manager. And then you can see this is the overview. We have health, CPU usage, memory users, some hardware information. We can get some SSH information. We can view our logs again, because it's a... Now, typically I don't need to view logs inside cockpit because this is a local machine. I just open up a terminal and do this. I wouldn't do this in a web browser, but imagine, of course, you're logged in remotely and then we have storage and we'll get some information about all the disk in the machine. And you can actually manage your ZFS pools. If you're doing ZFS on the remote server, you're checking out a networking. I'm going to skip because it's going to include some IP information. There's really not much to see there anyway. Virtual machines, this lists all the virtual machines. Remember the list of virtual machines you guys saw in Vert Manager? They're all here inside cockpit. I didn't have to do anything, because they were already installed using QEMU and Libvert. They're already here, available in cockpit, just like they were available inside Vert Manager. There's an accounts tab here. This just lists the accounts. I'm assuming these are the accounts that could access cockpit DT as a member of the Libvert group. And of course, root has access to everything. And there's a nobody user here. There's services. I'm assuming this is listing all the services that are running using system D, system CTL. Because, again, you typically want to check out what is running on the remote machine. Now locally, I would just open up a terminal and do a system CTL status and get all the services running on the machine. I really don't need a web interface doing this on localhost. But again, if you're on a remote server, this makes a lot of sense. Then down here, you have applications. And I guess there's different kind of plug-ins or extensions for cockpit. I don't know how many of them are available for Arch Linux. These three, I didn't do anything special. These are just here, kernel dump, machines, and storage. The machines, I think it's the extra package, the cockpit-machines thing that we installed. I'm assuming that's how I got that. The storage one is probably the extra package for managing ZFS pools. I think the extra package for that is cockpit-zfs-manager. I go down here to software updates. It will tell me what packages can be updated on the machine. I could install all updates again on my local machine. I would never really use this to update my machine. I can access a terminal here inside the web browser. This is my terminal, and it looks like it's at the fish shell, which is my default shell. I'm wondering... Well, of course, I'm in Qt browser, so I've got to get into insert mode, but let's see. It looks like it is the fish shell because it wants to do the auto suggestions and completions and everything. So that's just a standard shell. My user's default shell is fish. That's how I got the Starship prompt and the fish shell here. Of course, the most interesting parts of this are going to be virtual machines here. So I've got all my virtual machines. You can see none of them are running. It gives me the status. All of them are shut off right now. I could run one of them. I could create a VM. I could import a VM. Let's just run one because this actually was a little weird because I started and it's running. Of course, it's running in the background until you actually launch it in some kind of viewer. So if I click on, I just launched a Nomad BSD because I installed the latest version of Nomad BSD the other day because I'm going to do a video about it probably tomorrow. This video is not about Nomad BSD though, but this VM is running. And then in this screen here, you have the option to launch remote viewer. Now, you have to have vert-viewer installed on your system. If you don't, then clicking this does nothing. Well, it does something. I'll click on it and show you. It's going to download a file that ends in .vv. I'll download it to my home directory so it's easy to find here. And then now that .vv for vert-viewer file is in my home directory, what I'm going to do is I'll open up a graphical file manager to find it just so you guys can see what this thing looks like. It is qwe-download.vv. Click on it and it launches. Let me close the file manager here. And yeah, this is going to be Nomad BSD. It's asking for a password because I've got it encrypted here. Let me see if I can make this full screen here. Actually, it's got a little menu. We'll let that boot up for a second. And Nomad BSD booted up just fine. It's complaining VBox client, the virtual box kernel service is not running. That's because I created this as a VDI image, which is a virtual box disk image. So I imported it from virtual box. I created the VM originally in virtual box. And then I converted it to use vert manager and cockpit. And if I opened a terminal here, let me see if it will actually grab the mouse. Yeah, and you know, performance is actually not that bad with whatever video driver is running at the moment. Let me see if I can run a X render dash 1920 by 1080 while it auto auto completed. So they may be using the fish shell or maybe it's probably ZSH. But anyway, it actually looks really nice and everything. Of course, I'll do something on Nomad BSD at a later date for now. Let me just go ahead and shut this VM down, but that is vert viewer. And you can only use that dot VV file that you download one time. When I shut down the system and this VM closes out, that dot VV file goes away. Even if you could click it a second time, it will not work a second time. So there's no reason to save it or copy it or anything. It's a it's a one time deal. And if you want to come back to this VM, you got to click the launch remote viewer button. One more time you get a new dot VV file for this particular VM. Let me get back into the cockpit viewer here. If I go to virtual machines, that tab here again, let me create a new VM. What VM should I create? I'm actually not sure what ISOs I have on the system. So I'm just going to do tests because I'll probably just get rid of this VM as soon as this video is over installation type. Do we want to download a NOS local install media? Yeah, let's see what I have downloaded locally installation source. Probably going to be in slash home slash DT slash downloads. Let me get back in here and get the full list of everything in my downloads directory. I have a magia. I did a video about that a while ago, but I have that ISO. Choose an operating system is magia listed as a choice. Magia seven is that's close enough. This is the latest magia eight that came out a few days ago. Create a new volume. Do we want to do storage pools or you got all your settings here? The size of the VM. I don't know how much looks like by default. It wants to do 20 gigs. I'll go with that two gigs of ram again. I'm not keeping this VM. So I really don't care about the settings. If I hit create, let's just see if it creates the VM. I actually hadn't tried to create a new VM this way because I've just imported all my existing VMs, but it looked like it created it because yeah, now I have test. Not only did it create it, it started it running. So let me go ahead and shut that down. Otherwise, I'm going to have a VM running in the background on my machine and never know about it. And I'm going to be wondering why Ram usage is a little high on my machine. Looks like it's going to take a little while to shut down though. One of the things magia is a system D distribution. So sometimes shutdown, you know, just a polite shutdown can take, you know, a minute or two on these things. You guys are actually not seeing the shutdown because my head is in the way. And I've been waiting for that VM to shut down for a minute. And it's probably some stop jobs that are hung up in system D. Can I force shutdown? Yeah, they do have a force shutdown option. One of the things I did notice, you know, looking at VMs here inside cockpit, Vert Manager had a ton of options. That's why it was such a good program. It's probably the best graphical front end for LibVert virtual machines. There is because you can pretty much do everything there is to do within Vert Manager. But cockpit, the options do seem a little limited. Like how do I change the graphics driver inside cockpit? You know, you really have to kind of search around for some of this stuff. Let me move my head out of the way so you guys can see some of the options to edit. I mean, I can edit the memory, the number of CPUs we're using. I can edit some of the disk settings. Vert IO, of course, that's for the bus. You could edit that. SATA SCSI USB. Cancel that. I don't want to change any of that. You can edit some of the network interfacing stuff as well. It looks like we can create snapshots of our VM as well. Like, again, I don't see anything about video drivers, you know, changing from like the Vert IO driver to the QXL driver or VGA driver or whatever driver or it's entirely possible. I would just have to drop into a terminal and just do this with your standard command line commands for changing these QEMU VMs, you know, and then specify a particular device such as VGA or QXL or something. But I'm hoping there is a graphical way somewhere in cockpit, but I have not found it. But I'll explore a little bit more with cockpit. Overall, you know, I spent just a couple of days playing around with it a little bit and I've been kind of impressed with it for a web front end, I'll be honest. I probably will stick with Vert Manager for a little while longer, just because Vert Manager, even though it's deprecated and it hasn't been under development for a couple of years, it still works. There's nothing wrong with it. You can keep using Vert Manager and I will certainly keep using Vert Manager, but I will also keep cockpit installed. I've already installed it and I've got the SystemD services running in the background. I certainly will keep up with cockpit because it obviously is going to be the future. At some point, Vert Manager will die and cockpit apparently is going to be the future, at least according to Red Hat. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank EBSI, Dallas Gabe, Lou Mitchell, Alan and Kami, R35230, Chuck, David the Other, David Dillon, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, Scott, Wes and Willie. They are the producers of this episode. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode about creating VMs using cockpit, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, look for DT over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace. I should install TempolOS.