libvirt - The virtualization API libvirt is a toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes). Most optional dependencies are autodetected and having the required libs in place will build the respective features automatically. The group can be specified at build time like this: VIRTGROUP=somegroup ./libvirt.SlackBuild (default: users) You'll want to keep this in sync with what qemu uses (it also defaults to the "users" group). If you want to start the libvirt daemon at boot, add this to /etc/rc.d/rc.local # Start libvirt: if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.libvirt ]; then /etc/rc.d/rc.libvirt start fi and if you want it to stop at shutdown add this to /etc/rc.d/rc.local_shutdown # Stop libvirt: if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.libvirt ]; then /etc/rc.d/rc.libvirt stop fi Have a look at the commented part of rc.libvirt for some gotchas. netcat-openbsd is an optional dependency (needed if you want to connect from a remote host using virt-manager). Other optional dependencies include avahi and xen.