Setup Incus on Fedora

incus.md

Setup Incus on Fedora

Incus is a utility for managing both LXC containers and virtual machines. Their website describes it as "a next generation system container, application container, and virtual machine manager".

Install software

# `qemu-audio-spice` is required to enable VMs to start
# It is not necessary for containers.
sudo dnf install incus qemu-audio-spice

Configure user and system

# Add subuid and subgid ranges for root user
echo "root:1000000:1000000000" | sudo tee -a /etc/subuid /etc/subgid

# Enable and start systemd services
sudo systemctl enable --now incus-startup.service

# Add your user to the `incus-admin` group so the `sudo` is not required
sudo usermod -aG incus-admin $USER
newgrp incus-admin # or logout / restart

Important

As at February 2026, the incus-agent binary installed through DNF does not allow connecting into a virtual machine.

It can be replaced with one from the projects Github repo with the following command:

sudo curl -L -o /usr/bin/incus-agent https://github.com/lxc/incus/releases/latest/download/bin.linux.incus-agent.x86_64

Create a virtual machine

incus launch --vm images:debian/12 debian-vm

Enter the VM

incus exec debian-vm -- bash