Run Linux VM on macOS

Make sure UTM is installed on your macOS machine.

Installing Ubuntu Server 26.04

We will be installing Ubuntu Server 26.04 LTS as the Linux distro. You can find the official installation guide here.

Download the ISO image of the Ubuntu Server installer from this link.
Open UTM and click the “+” button to open the VM creation wizard.
Select “Virtualize”.
Select “Linux”.
Pick the amount of RAM and CPU cores you wish to give access to the VM. I chose 4GB RAM and default CPU Cores. Press “Continue” to continue.
Click “Browse” and select the Ubuntu Server ISO downloaded from the link above. Press “Continue” to continue.
Specify the maximum amount of drive space to allocate. I chose 64GB as the disk size. Press “Continue” to continue.
We will setup shared directory later on. Press “Continue” to continue.
Update name to Ubuntu-26.04.
Press “Save” to create the VM and press the Run button to start the VM.
Go through the Ubuntu installer. At the end, you’ll have the option to “Reboot Now,” but after selecting that option and rebooting, the reboot may fail. (It will hang at a black screen with a blinking cursor.) This is expected!
If the VM did not restart automatically, manually quit the VM, unmount the installer ISO, and start the VM again to boot into your new installation.

If you installed Ubuntu Server, then at the end of the installation, you will not have any GUI. To install Ubuntu Desktop, log in and run:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop
sudo reboot

SPICE agent is required for clipboard sharing as well as dynamic display resolution (it should have been already installed). Read more here.
```
sudo apt install spice-vdagent
```
Additional features such as time syncing and scripting are supported by the QEMU agent. Read more here.
```
sudo apt install qemu-guest-agent
```
Shut down the VM and attach a shared directory by creating and selecting a folder on the host machine (macOS). I used Ubuntu-26.04-Shared-Folder as the folder name.
VirtFS enables QEMU directory sharing. Read more here. Add the following entry by doing sudo nano /etc/fstab. You can replace /mnt/utm with a different folder if you like.
```
# UTM Shared Folder
share /mnt/utm 9p trans=virtio,version=9p2000.L,rw,_netdev,nofail,auto 0 0
```
After updating /etc/fstab you need to create an empty folder for the mount:

sudo mkdir /mnt/utm

Restart the VM.
Put a test file in the Ubuntu-26.04-Shared-Folder on the host machine. Open terminal in VM and run the following command. You will be able to see the test file 🎉.

ls /mnt/utm

To fix permissions so that we don’t have to do sudo always, refer to this section.