How-to "remotely" install Slackware in a qemu VM from the host?
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How-to "remotely" install Slackware in a qemu VM from the host?
I want to try booting a machine to do a Slackware installation remotely, but at the moment have only one real machine (my laptop) at hand.
How can I boot a qemu VM, but from the host? Does any one know how to boot a VM from the host, through PXE or simulating a serial console, whatever? I would be grateful of any clue.
Last edited by Didier Spaier; 07-03-2014 at 07:05 AM.
The easiest way would be to make a isofile from the Slackware DVD and pass it as a parameter to the guest
Yes, I've done that many times, but to be more clear what I really want is not use VM's console as display but a host's terminal (either in console mode or under X) as if the VM was a remote machine. I probably could figure that out from the docs + an Internet search but to be honest I feel a bit lazy today...
Last edited by Didier Spaier; 07-03-2014 at 07:24 AM.
Amazingly, display using fbterm (as set by the installer) is right in the vnc client with a true type font (DejaVu Sans Mono as set in the installer), though fbterm be supposed to run only when controlled by an interactive tty hence not under X
I tried also without the -vga option (thus defaulting to a cirrus video card), again display is as expected (with a bitmap font is this case as fbterm is not run by the installer because there is no 32bpp vesa mode available).
So far so good, I'm going to try the other methods now.
@ Richard Cranium: thanks for the clue, I don't know libvirt and virt-manager but it never hurts to learn
Last edited by Didier Spaier; 07-03-2014 at 03:00 PM.
But it failed, because as I didn't use qemu's -net option it fell back to the default "-net nic -net user". Then I willingly tried to use qemu's own network stack with this command:
I lost some time figuring out needed files' layout in /tftpboot/slint.14.1 (I had to "mv isolinux/* .") but eventually that succeeded and I got the same display in the vnc client as previously.
But as that's not what I planned to do I'll try to actually use the host's PXE server tomorrow.
Last edited by Didier Spaier; 07-03-2014 at 06:34 PM.
Now for the PXE-boot, but this time with the PXE server set in the host and IPs suggested by Eric, just added the option no_subtree_check in /etc/exports. In /etc/dhcpd.conf:
Take a look at virsh when you get a chance, Didier. It' a command line tool that let's you interact directly with the virtual environment through APIs in libvirt. The only other suggestions I'd make is, what your building is considered a loop or img format, you'd have a more compliant image (faster, easier to work with) if you modified it into a qcow2 format (which I think you can do via a snapshot with virsh, but I'm not on my home machine so all that documentation isn't available to me right now).
Once you have them built, you can SSH into them just like they were real machines.
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