I have a system remotely setup with kvm.

I have a couple of virtual machines setup I've moved up, but something is wrong with them.

I don't have vnc installed nore do I have x11 installed on that machine.

I cannot install either on the host machine and I would like to run with out it.

I need to see what system the remote system our doing during start up.

I want to redirect the console output to a serial console or to a terminal window so I can view the output.

How can I view this output?

Is there away to forward it to a text file or forward X11 to my machine and view it over vnc?

Can X11 forwarded if the the remote machine doesn't have X11?

any input or suggestions is welcome thank you.

Do I understand correctly that the physical KVM server system is remote? And you don't have and don't want to use a GUI on the server?

If that's the case, you definitely want to use SSH (secure shell). Do you have OpenSSH installed on the server? Once it's setup, you can use the ssh command to get a bash command prompt on the remote machine. Wonderful!

Of course, you wont' be able to see it boot that way, but that's what the dmesg command is for. Use it to get a replay of critical boot up messages.

And of course, don't forget to inspect /var/log/messages, or whatever recent files are in /var/log.

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