KVM guest setup problems (Ubuntu 12.10)

Question

-The host system that KVM is running on is Ubuntu 12.10. - I am trying to install 12.10 on it as a virtual guest.

However, when I issue the virt-install command it replies with this:

Starting install...
Creating domain...                                                                                                                                                        |    0 B     00:00     
Connected to domain ubuntu1210
Escape character is ^]

Then nothing more is printed to the screen until I click control-c.

• The command I am using is:

virt-install -n ubuntu1210 -c /dev/cdrom --network bridge=br0 --disk /var/lib/libvirt/images/ubuntu1210.qcow2 -r 512 -v --nographics --os-type linux --os-variant ubuntuquantal 

(Install cd is in drive)

Please do not tell me how to do this with ubuntu-vm-builder as I am aiming to set up this and VMs of other OSs so I would prefer to learn this way.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Your VM is off and running at this point, but if you want to use the --nographics option you'll likely need to add something like -x console=ttyS0 in your virt-install command to be able to connect to the shell via ssh (or serial, though this may require more configuration).

However, it's quite a bit easier to get rid of --nographics and use --vnc instead to allow you to connect from any vnc-compatible client (for instance, virt-manager is a good one for Ubuntu desktop) remotely to the KVM host. The --vnc option isn't a resource hog, and makes it quite a bit easier to manage guests and guest installation. Run your virt-install command on the KVM host server, then fire up virt-manager (or whatever) from another computer, point it at your KVM host and you should be able to connect and carry on with the installation. On older versions of Ubuntu you needed to set a root password to connect from virt-manager on another system, but I don't know if this is the case anymore.