01 Installation

Quickemu is available in the repositories of the following distros (packaging status by Repology.org):

Arch Linux

Quickemu version is available from the AUR (Arch user repository), and can be installed via any AUR helper. Assuming your AUR helper is yay, Run the the following command:

yay -Sy quickemu

or for all the latest unreleased fixes (and bugs) a rolling package is available as

yay -Sy quickemu.git

Debian (and derivatives)

Quickemu is available in Debian 13 (Trixie) and later

A .deb package is available for Debian and derivatives on this project's GitHub releases page. Download the .deb and install it with apt-get.

sudo apt-get install ./quickemu_x.y.z-1_all.deb

Ubuntu

Quickemu is included in the Universe repository from plucky (25.04)

Quickemu is also available from a PPA for Ubuntu users. To install Quickemu and all the dependencies, run the following in a terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:flexiondotorg/quickemu
sudo apt update
sudo apt install quickemu

Users of noble (24.04) or later should install qemu-system-modules-spice if this is not already installed.

sudo apt install  qemu-system-modules-spice

Fedora

Quickemu is now packaged natively in Fedora 41 and 42.

sudo dnf install quickemu

MacOS / Homebrew

brew tap quickemu-project/quickemu https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu

brew install quickemu
# For the latest release or
brew install quickemu --HEAD
# for dev build / fixes pending a release

Nix & NixOS

Flake

Stable releases of Quickemu are published to FlakeHub for Nix users. See the Quickemu flake on FlakeHub for more details:

• https://flakehub.com/flake/quickemu-project/quickemu

Nixpkgs

Add Quickemu to your systemPackages. For example:

systemPackages = with pkgs; [
  quickemu
];

  

Nix Shell

You can also quickly try quickemu in a Nix shell.

New command interface

nix shell nixpkgs#quickemu

Legacy command interface

nix-shell -p quickemu

Any Linux (installing from source)

git clone --filter=blob:none https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu
cd quickemu/docs
sudo make install

When installing from source, you will need to install the following requirements manually:

• QEMU (6.0.0 or newer) with GTK, SDL, SPICE & VirtFS support
• bash (4.0 or newer)
• Coreutils
• curl
• EDK II
• gawk
• grep
• glxinfo
• jq
• pciutils
• procps
• python3
• mkisofs
• usbutils
• util-linux; including uuidgen.
• sed
• socat
• spicy
• swtpm
• xdg-user-dirs
• xrandr
• zsync
• unzip

These examples may save a little typing:

Install requirements on Debian

These should be handled by dependencies in Trixie and later. For earlier versions (and their derivatives):

sudo apt-get install bash coreutils curl genisoimage grep jq mesa-utils ovmf pciutils procps python3 qemu sed socat spice-client-gtk swtpm-tools unzip usbutils util-linux uuidgen-runtime xdg-user-dirs xrandr zsync 

Install requirements on Fedora

These are handled natively for Fedora 41 on. For earlier versions:

# it may be needed to add additional installation sources to obtain some packages
# for example zsync is no longer in the fedora repo, but can be obtained from copr
#sudo dnf copr enable elxreno/zsync -y 
sudo dnf install bash coreutils curl edk2-tools genisoimage grep jq mesa-demos pciutils procps python3 qemu sed socat spice-gtk-tools swtpm unzip usbutils util-linux xdg-user-dirs xrandr zsync

Install requirements on Gentoo

Please note that you may have to use sys-firmware/edk2-ovmf instead of sys-firmware/edk2-ovmf-bin - depending on how your system is configured.

sudo emerge --ask --noreplace app-emulation/qemu \
 app-shells/bash \
 sys-apps/coreutils \
 net-misc/curl \
 sys-firmware/edk2-ovmf-bin \
 sys-apps/gawk \
 sys-apps/grep \
 x11-apps/mesa-progs \
 app-misc/jq \
 sys-apps/pciutils \
 sys-process/procps \
 app-cdr/cdrtools \
 sys-apps/usbutils \
 sys-apps/util-linux \
 sys-apps/sed \
 net-misc/socat \
 app-emulation/spice \
 app-crypt/swtpm \
 x11-misc/xdg-user-dirs \
 x11-apps/xrandr \
 net-misc/zsync \
 app-arch/unzip

Install on macOS

Install the Quickemu requirements using brew:

brew install bash cdrtools coreutils jq python3 qemu usbutils samba sha3sum socat swtpm zsync

Now clone the project:

git clone https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu
cd quickemu