Nothing happens with Qemu

[Adam J Richardson]

Rakhesh Sasidharan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to get Qemu working on my FreeBSD 6.2 PC. But nothing seems to
> be happening. I posted my problem at the Qemu forums but haven't got any
> replies there (I wonder if any one even uses those forums coz mine is like
> the last post there!) Just trying my luck here too in case I get some
> tips/ ideas.
> 
> Installed Qemu from the ports. Without SDL (coz I don't have X etc
> installed and I just SSH into this box). With KQEMU module. After that I
> ran "/usr/local/etc/rc.d/kqemu" for loading the modules "aio" and "kqemu".
> All went fine.
> 
> Next I created a 2G image. "qemu-img create /tmp/something.img 2G". That
> too went fine.
> 
> Then I tried to install some OS into this image. Put the CD in the drive,
> and tried "qemu -boot d -cdrom /dev/acd0 -hda /tmp/something.img". But
> nothing happens! The CD starts spinning in the drive but nothing happens
> after that. I ran "top" and I can see the qemu process is active and
> taking some 128MB memory, but there's no other signs of life.
> 
> I tried the above with two OSes. I tried with an Ubuntu server and also an
> OpenBSD 4.1. Tried both to make sure its not a OS specific problem. I even
> ripped the CDs to ISO files and tried running from that (coz I read
> someplace that FreeBSD Qemu has problems reading from CDs). But no luck
> ... whatever I do, nothing happens.
> 
> I also tried with the "-full-screen" option. But no go.
> 
> Finally, I tried running with the -nographic option. I remm reading
> somewhere that that usually helps. That time I get a "(qemu)" prompt and
> that's it -- nothing happens. Tried stuff like Ctrl+Alt+1,2,F, etc but
> nothing happens. Can't even Ctrl-C out. Finally had to kill the process
> from another terminal.
> 
> I also tried with the option -monitor stdio. That gives me a (qemu) prompt
> in which I can type commands. But I couldn't figure a way to proceed
> further after that.
> 
> I tried all these steps through SSH as well as on the console (including
> uncommenting the console entry in /etc/tty and trying). No luck.
> 
> Any ideas what could be going wrong? I figure it must be something to do
> with me not having X and not compiling Qemu with SDL/ X support ... is
> that the case?
> 
> Thanks,
> Rakhesh
> 

Hi Rakhesh,

I see you have covered the usual bases with qemu. I can't suggest 
anything else there.

It seems logical that qemu would need to run on top of X, in much the 
same way that Firefox [just to pick an example at random] won't work 
without X. I'm still a FreeBSD newbie though, so I have no idea how X 
works. I'm still struggling to upgrade my Xorg to 7.2. [Stupid missing 
OpenGL drivers! >:( ]

I would try installing X [good luck with that!] and see if that helps.

Adam J Richardson