Getting Started

Select a Linux Distribution

Cubic can create a virtual machine for you from a common Linux distribution. First of all, you need to decide which distribution you want to use. You can list all supported distributions with:

$ cubic images
Name                       Arch         Size   Cached
almalinux:9                amd64   554.8 MiB       no
archlinux:latest           amd64   530.6 MiB       no
debian:{12, bookworm}      amd64   426.8 MiB       no
fedora:43                  amd64   556.3 MiB       no
gentoo:latest              amd64     1.7 GiB       no
opensuse:15.6              amd64   690.1 MiB       no
rockylinux:10              amd64   519.8 MiB       no
ubuntu:{22.04, jammy}      amd64   295.6 MiB       no
[...]

The list above is shortened to one release per distribution. Run the command to see every image. By default Cubic only lists images for the architecture of your host. Add --all to see the other architectures too.

Create the Virtual Machine

In the next step you can create the virtual machine with a single command:

$ cubic create example --image debian:bookworm

List all Virtual Machines

You can list all your virtual machines with the following command:

$ cubic instances
Name      Arch    CPUs    Memory   Disk Used   Disk Total   Running
example   amd64      4   4.0 GiB   941.2 MiB    100.0 GiB        no

The machine is created but not started yet, so Running is no. Add --all to see the process id of each running machine. Cubic picks the number of CPUs and the memory size from the resources of your host, so your values can differ.

Additional Settings

You can also override the default virtual machine settings and define the number of CPUs, the memory size and disk size. For example to create a virtual machine with 4 CPU cores, 4 GiB of memory and 10 GiB of disk storage use:

$ cubic create example --image debian:bookworm --cpus 4 --memory 4G --disk 10G

Start the virtual machine

Once the virtual machine was created you can start it with:

$ cubic start example

Connect with SSH

When the virtual machine is running you can simply connect over SSH by:

$ cubic ssh example