Ubuntu are now supplying a libguestfs package (or to be more accurate, they are just copying the Debian package) but it doesn't work out of the box. There is a bug in apt which we worked around in febootstrap 3.14, but the supplied version of febootstap is only 3.12. Hence you will get errors like this during installation: febootstrap: aptitude: error: no file was downloaded corresponding to package <some package name> and you'll get the same error if you try to build from source. The solution is to build febootstrap 3.14: cd /tmp sudo apt-get build-dep febootstrap sudo apt-get install devscripts apt-get source febootstrap wget http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/febootstrap/files/febootstrap-3.14.tar.gz tar zxf febootstrap-3.14.tar.gz cd febootstrap-3.14 rm -rf debian cp -a ../febootstrap-3.12/debian . vi debian/changelog # change the first line: 3.12 -> 3.14 debuild -i -uc -us -b That will create an febootstrap 3.14 .deb file in /tmp which you can install: sudo dpkg -i ../febootstrap_3.14-1_amd64.deb Then you can go ahead and use the libguestfs package: sudo update-guestfs-appliance or compile libguestfs from source. There is another problem which you may hit, if you add a completely blank disk to libguestfs (this also affects libguestfs-test-tool): https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/931371 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42778 Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/