Comment 12 for bug 615077

There are two issues here:

1- virtinst creates the libvirt xml file with a hardcoded Xauthority file set to ~/.Xauthority. The version of gdm that comes with Maverick now sets the xauthority file to a dynamic directory in /var/run/gdm. Every time you log in, your Xauthority file will be in a different directory, it is therefore not possible to fix virtinst. libvirt would need to be substantially modified to omit having the xauthority file specified directly in the xml, and would need to obtain it from the user's environment each time he starts a VM.

2- libvirt now runs with reduced privileges. When kvm is spawned, it is now done so under the libvirt-qemu user, which does not have the appropriate permissions required to access the user's xauthority file.