Comment 20 for bug 187048

Here's one approach to solving the problem, liberally borrowed from MythTV.

When running mythfrontend, it runs a script that checks if you're a member of the mythtv group, and if not, it warns you about this, and offers you the opportunity to enter your password, and it will try to use sudo to add you to the appropriate group.

I'm attaching a debdiff that adds just such a script, /usr/bin/virt-manager-check-groups. On launching virt-manager, it will loop through the groups (kvm, libvirtd, vde2-net), and if the group exists, it will check if the current user is a member.

<aside>
The bulk of the code is trying to figure out if you're running gnome or kde, and finding the correct helper applications. Really, it would be nice if this entire script were a nice little standalone tool of its own, taking any group as an input.
</aside>