How to Run a AMD64 Bit Linux VM on a Mac M1

This tutorial will show you how you can run 64bit Ubuntu Linux Virtual Machines on a Apple Mac M1 arm64 architecture macbook using UTM.

Installation

Head over to their documentation and download the UTM.dmg file and install it, once it is installed and you have opened UTM, you should see this screen:

Creating a Virtual Machine

In my case I would like to run a Ubuntu VM, so head over to the Ubuntu Server Download page and download the version of choice, I will be downloading Ubuntu Server 22.04, once you have your ISO image downloaded, you can head over to the next step which is to “Create a New Virtual Machine”:

I will select “Emulate” as I want to run a amd64 bit architecture, then select “Linux”:

In the next step we want to select the Ubuntu ISO image that we downloaded, which we want to use to boot our VM from:

Browse and select the image that you downloaded, once you selected it, it should show something like this:

Select continue, then select the architecture to x86_64, the system I kept on defaults and the memory I have set to 2048MB and cores to 2 but that is just my preference:

The next screen is to configure storage, as this is for testing I am setting mine to 8GB:

The next screen is shared directories, this is purely optional, I have created a directory for this:

mkdir ~/utm

Which I’ve then defined for a shared directory, but this depends if you need to have shared directories from your local workstation.

The next screen is a summary of your choices and you can name your vm here:

Once you are happy select save, and you should see something like this:

You can then select the play button to start your VM.

The console should appear and you can select install or try this vm:

This will start the installation process of a Linux Server:

Here you can select the options that you would like, I would just recommend to ensure that you select Install OpenSSH Server so that you can connect to your VM via SSH.

Once you get to this screen:

The installation process is busy and you will have to wait a couple of minutes for it to complete. Once you see the following screen the installation is complete: