FIX: Black screen at login for LMDE/Cinnamon

So, I installed a fresh copy of LMDE on a machine. Obviously, that will include doing an apt-get dist-upgrade to ensure every thing is all up to date.

After doing that, I restarted the box and got the Mint login screen, entered my password and got . . . . . a black screen with a mouse pointer and nothing else.

I couldn't find an answer on the Internet so eventually I took a punt and entered:

apt-get install cinnamon

and what would you know, Cinnamon wasn't installed at all. For some, the distribution upgrade had decided to remove Cinnamon altogether. After the install finished I rebooted and all was good again.

"Permission denied" using libvirt and kvm on CentOS

If you are trying to create a VM using virt-manager on a KVM/QEMU host and you are getting "permission denied" then you need to either disable selinux or configure it to allow access.

To disable it edit /etc/selinux/config and change it from "enforcing" to "disabled" and then use  this command to make it take effect without rebooting.

setenforce 0

Install KVM on CentOS

Installing KVM on CentOS is pretty simple.

yum install kvm libvirt python-virtinst qemu-kvm

You probably want it to start automatically too:

chkconfig libvirtd on
service libvirtd start

You probably also should configure bridged networking.

And finally, if you would like to use virt-manager to administer your VM's from your Linux desktop you will probably want to setup passwordless key access.