Vlmcsd on Ubuntu 18.04

vlmcsd is an open source KMS emulator that can run on a variety of CPU architectures and operating systems.  You can find it officially on the My Digital Life forum (registration required) although at least one other person has mirrored it on GitHub. I’ve been running it for the past few months on my Skull Canyon NUC running Ubuntu 18.04; below are instructions to get it running as a service.

The easiest way to download is through Github. I also renamed the binary to just vlmcsd to make it simpler and copied it to /usr/local/bin:

Make a user to run vlmcsd as a service and give the user permissions on the binary:

Create a systemd script:

Give it the following contents:

Make a folder under /var/log for logging and give the vlmcsd user permissions:

Now you just need to enable and start the service:

Check the status of the service:

If all goes well, you should see output similar to below:

To activate a product like Office 2016 against this KMS emulator, you can use the ospp.vbs script located in your Office installation folder: