Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu on Windows: Redirect output to console

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 25/06/07, Peter Laursen <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Thanks for your replies, they have been of great help. I still havenøt
> solved the basic problem of redirecting the output to a console, mostly
> because -nographic does not work on Windows ports of Qemu...
>
> There already are Linux operating systems that ship with screen readers
> that read the graphic desktops built in, so I would only want to run
> text-based operating systems (FreeBSD, for example - I've heard that is
> almost pure command line and I'd like to check it out if possible. I
> know tha Debian is)

That's not true, FreeBSD as well as all Linux flavours are unix clones
and they can run all the same software, including the GNOME and KDE
environments, as well as all the command line world. Debian's
installer is text based and FreeBSD's installer is text based but the
rest depends on whatever you configured in the installer.

> Sadly, I couldn't get the -serial option to work either - here's the
> command line that I used to start qemu with:
>
> qemu.exe -L . -m 128 -hda linux.img -soundhw all -localtime -M isapc -
> serial tcp:127.0.0.1:5555,server -nographic

In addition to that you need to tell Linux to actually run a console
on the serial port instead of on the video card. This can be done in
the bootloader by appending "console=ttyS0" to kernel parameters, but
there's unfortunately no way to interact with the bootloader without a
video adapter because bootloaders are configured that way on most
distributions. Assuming you have a sound enabled SSH client you could
SSH into the linux guest and interact with it that way, from there you
can reconfigure the system to make a serial console.

Unrelated to that, there's a patch for QEMU that adds an curses based
interface similar to the one that the bochs emulator has. I imagine it
can be a hell to set up on ms windows, if at all possible, but it
eliminates the use serial ports, it lets you interact with the
bootloader and no reconfiguration is needed.

Have you tried distributions like Oralux, BLINUX or Free(b)soft? I
know Free(b)soft is all command line based (or actually emacs based)
and sound enabled at the same time, by employing festival if no
hardware sythesiser or braille tty (brltty) is found.

I still think SSH is the most universal way to interact with any
system and lets you experience all the non-graphical parts of the OS,
including Debian installer or FreeBSD installer.

Regards,