Here are quick instructions on how to set up sambashare in order to easily share files between a Host Ubuntu 20.04 and Virtual Ubuntu 22.04.

What Is The Point of This Guide?

While there are countless articles detailing how to share files easily across Host and Virtual Machine for KVM, I was unable to find any that does it for specifically Host Ubuntu 20.04.

For Ubuntu 20.04, virt-manager in this version of the Operating System (OS) does not enable shared memory which is neccessary to set up the shared folder between Host and Virtual Machine.

Even with backports available for virt-manager and KVM is updated to the latest version 4.1.0 as of this writing, Enable Shared Memory will remain disabled due to a discrepancy in qemu-system-x86 package dependency version.

Therefore, the current solution is to set up sambashare and share files via a shared-network folder approach.

The alternative would be to use a physical thumbdrive, treat it as the shared folder in question and tediously mount and unmount as you use. This is far too troublesome to rely on.

Steps

1. Start up your Virtual Ubuntu 22.04 via KVM's virt-manager.

2. Install sambashare in Virtual Ubuntu 22.04 by running the following command:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install sambashare

3. Include the following code snippet in the file, /etc/samba/smb.conf

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf



[ShareName]
   path = /path/to/shared/folder
   read only = no
   browsable = yes

Replace /path/to/shared/folder with the folder on Virtual Ubuntu 22.04 you wish to be the shared point.

Eg. /home/garybey/Downloads

4. Restart Samba using the command below to apply the changes.

sudo systemctl restart smbd

5. Create a password to lock the shared folder:

sudo smbpasswd -a username

Replace ‘username’ with your ubuntu user name.

6. In Host Ubuntu 20.04, identify the IP ADDRESS of Virtual Ubuntu 22.04 by running the following command in terminal:

virsh net-dhcp-leases default

7. Add the shared network folder to your file directory using the IP address of Virtual Ubuntu 22.04.

smb://INSERT IP ADDRESS HERE/

Eg. smb://192.168.50.25

References