In our previous tutorial, we discussed how to run Linux, macOS, Windows virtual machines with Quickemu. Quickemu is a command line program. Not everyone is a fan of command line mode. For those who prefer GUI over CLI, I present you Quickgui, a graphical frontend for Quickemu to create, run and manage virtual machines.
Table of Contents
What is Quickgui?
Quickgui is a Flutter frontend for quickget and quickemu. Using Quickgui, you can quickly create and run virtual machines via a simple graphical interface. No need to remember commands!
Quickgui is built with Flutter, an open source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase.
Install Quickgui in Linux
First, you need to install Quickemu and Quickget as described in the following link.
Install Quickgui in Ubuntu and its derivatives:
If you're using Ubuntu, or its derivatives like Elementary OS, Linux Mint and Pop OS, you can install Quickgui from a PPA like below.
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannick-mauray/quickgui
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install quickgui
Once installed, launch Quickgui from Dash or Menu:
Install Quickgui using Pre-compiled Binaries:
On other Linux platforms, download the pre-compiled binary from the releases page.
$ wget https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickgui/releases/download/v1.2.4/quickgui-1.2.4.tar.xz
Extract the downloaded archive:
$ cd quickgui-1.2.4/
Launch Quickgui using command:
$ ./quickgui
To install Quickgui system-wide, use this command:
$ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/local/bin/quickgui quickgui /path/to/quickgui 50
Create Virtual Machines with Quickgui
Open Quickgui application as shown in the installation section above.
The Quickgui default interface will look like as shown in the picture below. Quickgui consists of two sections:
- Manage existing machines (Manager section)
- Create new machines (Downloader section)
We don't have any VMs yet. So, let me click "Create new machines" button to create one.
Select the operating system type and its version and click Download. For demonstration purpose, I am going to download Zorin OS version 16.
The selected operating system's ISO image will be downloaded and saved in your HOME directory. If you manually launched Quickgui from a different directory, the ISO file will be saved in that directory.
You can choose different download location by clicking the three horizontal dots at the bottom.
Once you hit the download button, Quickgui will start to download the ISO of the selected OS.
After the download is complete, click "Dismiss" button.
Close the Downloader section to go back to the Main menu.
Similarly, you can download as many as ISO images you want.
Run Virtual Machines
From the Quickgui Main menu, click "Manage existing machines" button.
You will see the list of downloaded ISO images. As you can see in the image below, I have downloaded "Alpine Linux" and "Zorin 16". Click the Play button to start the VM using the ISO image.
The guest machine will boot now. All guest machines are accessible via Spicy client by default.
Now continue the guest OS installation as usual. Once the installation is complete, reboot the guest and start using it.
Access Virtual Machines
By default, a Virtual machine's console is automatically opened via the Spicy client. Just in case if you closed Spicy client window, simply click the "Connect display with SPICE" button from the Quickgui manager window to access/view the Virtual machine's console.
Similarly, you can click the "Connect with SSH" button(next to the SPICE client) to access the guest OS via SSH. Please note that the SSH button will be enabled only after you have installed and configured SSH on your guest machine.
Also, Quickgui supports some additional features like USB pass-through, clipboard and file sharing between host and guest machines out of the box. These features can be enabled or disabled with a single mouse click through Spicy client -> Options menu.
Stop Virtual Machines
To stop the running VM, click the Stop button from Quickgui manager window.
Delete Virtual Machines
If you don't need the virtual machine anymore, stop the VM first and click the Delete button from the Quickgui manager window. You can choose to delete only the VM disk and keep the configuration or delete the whole VM.
Conclusion
Quickgui makes the process of creating and managing Virtual machines much easier for newbies! After playing with Quickgui a while, I started to feel that Quickemu might be a good alternative to Oracle Virtualbox.
I guess I will use Quickemu along with Quickgui for a while to see how it performs. Give it a try and I really hope you'll find it useful too!
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5 comments
Somewhere in one of these articles it should be mentioned that if you have a CPU that does not support VT-X they will not work. QEMU still might (it does on mine), but these additional software pieces are built to require the virtualization extensions. You can install or build them on an Intel Centrino Duo, but they will not actually work. (I tried.)
Yes, you’re right. I somehow missed it. I added the instructions to find if a CPU supports VT-X in the “Quickemu” guide. Thanks for pointing it out.
I cannot get Quickgui to work. everytime I try to start the virtual machine it pops open a window with “Connect to Spice” at the top and I can’t figure out what I am doing wrong. I am running POP_OS on a 2014 intel Mac. Any help would be appreciated. I am a noob!
Simply click on “Connect to Spice” and you can access the VM using SPICE client.
That doesn’t work. It keeps popping up.