Xfce Forum

wrh1728

Member

Registered: 2020-12-15

Posts: 43

virt-manager not finding ssh-agent

This is happening under Xfce 4.16 in Slackware 15.0.

When I launch virt-manager by clicking on Xfce menu -> System -> Virtual Machine Manager, on trying to establish an SSH connection with a QEMU/KVM hypervisor the app keeps prompting to supply a passphrase to open my private key file in $HOME/.ssh - this despite of the fact that I have already done ssh-add, and other applications launched from the Xfce menu have no problem with this.

Now if I open a terminal emulator and launch /usr/bin/pyton3 /usr/bin/virt-manager from the CLI (which is basically what launching it from the Xfce menu is) I don't have that problem: the ssh-add settings are read, my SSH private key is unwrapped, and the rest proceeds as expected.

For some reason, this application when launched from the Xfce menu is not able to access the running SSH agent - perhaps because it does not know about the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable. Anybody know how to sort this out?

bggf1

Member

Registered: 2023-03-16

Posts: 17

Re: virt-manager not finding ssh-agent

Hi Wr,
Having no idea what could be the cause I am curious if something different happens if you change the .desktop file to use a terminal.
That should open a terminal and the application launched from there.