I'm new to Rancher Desktop and for the life of me, I cannot get it to run. I have even created a new Ubuntu VM on Virtual Machine. When ever I install it and try to run it, I get an error message saying:

Could you post the logs? They're accessible via the UI: https://docs.rancherdesktop.io/ui/troubleshooting/#show-logs

image.png

It is hard to diagnose with just a screenshot of a tiny subset of the logs. From what I can see it looks like one of the PID files is empty. I suspect this might be related to QEMU, so I would check for

/home/Mike/.local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/0/qemu.pid

If the file exists, then it should include a process id and not be empty. If it is empty, then we need to know why, which requires access to more of the log files. In this case most likely

ha.stderr.log

from the same directory. But check also for other PID files, like

ha.pid

.

lima.log

This snippet doesn't contain any information why the pid file is empty. As I said above, you need to provide the full set of logs, or at least

ha.stderr.log

(just guessing) to figure out more. Otherwise just doing a factory-reset might fix this.

lima.ha.stderr.log

Unfortunately this doesn't show why QEMU isn't starting and writing the pid to the file. Not sure if this is going to work, but I would try to run the command manually in a shell to see if it produces additional output:

/usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 -m 6144 -cpu host -machine q35,accel=kvm -smp 2,sockets=1,cores=2,threads=1 -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly=on,file=/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE_4M.fd -boot order=d,splash-time=0,menu=on -drive file=/home/Mike/.local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/0/basedisk,format=raw,media=cdrom,readonly=on -drive file=/home/Mike/.local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/0/diffdisk,if=virtio,discard=on -drive id=cdrom0,if=none,format=raw,readonly=on,file=/home/Mike/.local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/0/cidata.iso -device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi0 -device scsi-cd,bus=scsi0.0,drive=cdrom0 -netdev user,id=net0,net=192.168.5.0/24,dhcpstart=192.168.5.15,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:37075-:22 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0,mac=52:55:55:28:0c:ef -device virtio-rng-pci -display none -device virtio-vga -device virtio-keyboard-pci -device virtio-mouse-pci -device qemu-xhci,id=usb-bus -parallel none -chardev socket,id=char-serial,path=/home/Mike/.local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/0/serial.sock,server=on,wait=off,logfile=/home/Mike/.local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/0/serial.log -serial chardev:char-serial -chardev socket,id=char-serial-virtio,path=/home/Mike/.local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/0/serialv.sock,server=on,wait=off,logfile=/home/Mike/.local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/0/serialv.log -device virtio-serial-pci,id=virtio-serial0,max_ports=1 -device virtconsole,chardev=char-serial-virtio,id=console0 -chardev socket,id=char-qmp,path=/home/Mike/.local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/0/qmp.sock,server=on,wait=off -qmp chardev:char-qmp -chardev socket,path=/home/Mike/.local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/0/ga.sock,server=on,wait=off,id=qga0 -device virtio-serial -device virtserialport,chardev=qga0,name=io.lima-vm.guest_agent.0 -name lima-0 -pidfile /home/Mike/.local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/0/qemu.pid

Thank you, that fixed it.

Sorry, just for my own understanding, what is "that", that fixed it? Did you get an error message that explained why the pid file was empty?