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A Devuan guest in kvm and using spice-vdagentd

If you intend to use spice-vdagent in a devuan vm, you might be interested to know how to get the spice agent to actually work.

Symptoms

The option for "Scale Display -> Auto resize VM with window" is not functional in the spice viewer. In the guest's /var/log/syslog, you can see an error:

spice-vdagentd: error getting session for pid 2970: no such file or directory free

But that's about it.

The fix

Make file /etc/default/spice-vdagentd with contents:

SPICE_VDAGENTD_EXTRA_ARGS=-X

Then restart the daemon.

sudo service spice-vdagentd restart

The -X flag on the invocation disables systemd-logind integration. This is key for a devuan install because devuan exists to be free of the requirement for systemd.

References

Internet searches

  1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=spice-vdagentd%3A+Error+getting+session+for+pid+2970%3A+No+such+file+or+directory

Weblinks

  1. 14.04 - Systemd, cgroup, and LXC - Ask Ubuntu
  2. Bug #1633609 “spice-vdagentd does not work” : Bugs : spice-vdagent package : Ubuntu
  3. Configuration for spice-vdagentd - Ask Ubuntu

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