Nothing happens with Qemu

[Bill Moran]

Rakhesh Sasidharan <rakhesh at rakhesh.com> 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.

That option probably requires X to work.  Normally, qemu runs under X.
If you're new to qemu, you'll probably have an easier time with the
learning curve if you start out on a machine with X installed, as the
default setting work well with that.

> 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.

You're in the qemu Monitor at that point.  I doubt CTRL+ALT+1 will help
at that point, because you haven't specified anywhere for the console
to connect to.

> 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?

Have you tried using the vnc option and connecting to qemu through a
vnc client?  As I already said, I recommend starting out on a machine
with X until you're more familiar with qemu, as the default settings
pretty much do that anyway, but I expect a vnc connection will be the
second easiest.

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com