spice-vdagent(1)

📦
version 0.23.0 · 3 versions
, in alpine 3.24, arch rolling, fedora 43, fedora 44, nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 spice-vdagent — the manual page, but make it a group chat 💖

okay so bestie, this is the manual page for spice-vdagent — it lives in the General Commands Manual section (that's section 1, the one for actual runnable commands 🫶). pull up a chair, grab a boba, we're doing this.

✨ NAME ✨

spice-vdagent — the Spice guest agent X11 session agent 🧚

like, the lil buddy that lives inside your X11 session. one per session. she's got main character energy and she earns it.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

spice-vdagent [OPTIONS]

that's it. that's the whole vibe. options optional, slay mandatory 💅

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so the Spice guest agent for Linux is not one thing, it's two things, and you gotta know the difference because people mix them up constantly and it's giving confusion 😭

  • spice-vdagentd — the system wide daemon. she's the big sister, runs system-wide, holds it down.
  • spice-vdagent — the X11 session agent. and there is one per X11 session ⭐

and the glow-up? spice-vdagent gets automatically started in desktop environments which honor /etc/xdg/autostart, and under gdm. no manual labor required, she just shows up. iconic behavior, honestly 👑

✨ FEATURES ✨

here's what the Spice guest agent adds to Spice Linux guests. the whole résumé, no filler:

  • Client mouse mode — no need to grab mouse by client, and no mouse lag 🖱️✨ literally the smoothest cursor of your life.
  • Automatic adjustment of the X11 session's number of virtual monitors, and their resolution, to the number of client windows and their resolution — she resizes herself to match, no cap 🦋
  • Support of copy and paste (text and images) between the active X11 session and the client — and this supports both the primary selection and the clipboard, so yes, middle-click girlies you are SEEN 🙈
  • Support for transferring files from the client to the agent — files go in, files come out 📁💫

✨ OPTIONS ✨

one bullet per flag, exactly as written, no notes:

  • -h — Print a short description of all command line options. the "help me bestie" button 🆘
  • -d — Log debug messages. when you need her to overshare in the logs 🔍
  • -s port — Set virtio serial port. the default is /dev/virtio-ports/com.redhat.spice.0 🎀
  • -x — Don't daemonize. she stays in the foreground with you, attached, no vanishing act 💀
  • -f dir|xdg-desktop|xdg-download — Set directory where to save files send from the client. this can be either an arbitrary dir or one of the special values of xdg-desktop resp. xdg-download to select the default xdg Desktop resp. xdg Download directory. If no value is specified the default is xdg-desktop when running under a Desktop Environment which has icons on the desktop and xdg-download under other Desktop Environments. she reads the room, she picks the folder 📂🌸
  • -o 0|1 — Disable/enable opening the file save directory with xdg-open (showing the directory in the file manager) when a file transfer from the client completes. If no value is specified the default is 0 when running under a Desktop Environment which has icons on the desktop and 1 under other Desktop Environments. so: pop the folder open, or don't — she decides based on your desktop's whole situation ✨

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

Copyright 2010-2013 Red Hat, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.

There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. read that again, bestie, NO WARRANTY, not a single one, zero, nada 😭

and that's the whole page 💜

little sign-off from the footer, because you deserve the receipts: this is spice-vdagent version 0.23.0, dated April 2013 🌸 she's been serving this exact energy since 2013 and she has not missed once. periodt 💅🌈

📦 where this page comes from