Testing in a virtual machine

Testing on your main system is risky and makes quick experimentation difficult. By running BlossomOS in a virtual machine (VM), you can try out new packages, image tags, or custom changes safely and revert instantly using a snapshot.

Prerequisites

• Hardware virtualisation enabled in the BIOS
• KVM, QEMU, and libvirt
• virt-manager

virt-manager provides a graphical interface for creating and managing VMs. It comes pre-installed on the Developer Experience images ( -dx). For more details, see Understanding Image Tags.

1. Install BlossomOS in the VM

There’s no shortcut here, just install BlossomOS in the VM the same way you’d install it on a real PC:

1. Download the standard BlossomOS ISO from blossom.computer, you don’t need the NVIDIA ISO in a VM. See Installing BlossomOS for details on the download.
2. Open virt-manager and create a new VM, using the downloaded ISO as the install media.
3. Choose Fedora Linux as the operating system, and give the VM at least 4 GB of RAM, 2 CPUs, and 35 GB of disk space.
4. Start the VM and go through the installer as described in Installing BlossomOS.

2. Snapshot before testing

Before installing untrusted software or trying out a risky change, create a snapshot so you can revert immediately:

virsh snapshot-create-as <vm-name> clean-state

Restore it at any time with:

virsh snapshot-revert <vm-name> clean-state

You can also create and restore snapshots directly from the virt-manager interface.