Any advice on installing linux qemu guests ?

 As noted in blfs-support, I've finally started to play with qemu.
My initial use-case is for testing my ongoing tex-test scripts :
apparently, i386 binary versions of texlive do not include
mkluatexfontdb which I had been using in my configure script to check
for OTF/TTF fonts known to texlive but not to fontconfig.  [ The
problem with trying to use a minimal tex file to test if a font
exists is that tex will hang (waiting for Ctrl-D or perhaps 'x',
depending on which front-end and where it hangs) and that is not a
nice thing when you are running a configure script. ]  So, although
I hope to get a cut-down backup of an LFS-7.6 system to boot (the
full backup was just over 8GB as an uncompressed tarball, and
repeatedly hung qemu when the ETA for scp'ing it was down to 2 or 3
seconds), my current priority is installing distros so I can see what
happens with their tex installs.

 I've now moved this to my AMD A4 (needed more disk space that was
NOT backed up by fcron jobs) and like my phonon, -vga vmware works
well, and the default cirrus or std vga options do not, at least in
i386 xubuntu.  On the A4, -cpu host causes the guest xubuntu kernel
to oops (in vmware, not a real oops), so I no-longer do that.

 I'm also seeing problems where the qemu window grabs (most of) my
keyboard and mouse, so that I cannot use my other terms, but
Ctrl-Alt-Fn on the host still takes me to a tty where I can killall
qemu.

 But what is really annoying is distros which run from CD images,
but do not install.  Hence this mail - is there any good source of
information on working around issues with different linux guests, to
get them to install and boot ?

 Today I have tried slackware64 - it apparently died at ruby when
installing (all) the packages - not sure if that mattered, restarted
the installer from the 'configure' stage, but it could not install
lilo.  And I couldn't find where the "disk" was mounted.  Repeated,
again it stopped at ruby, but with a couple of 'killed' messages,
and then oopsed (again, in qemu, not a real oops).  Google found one
old example about using an initrd, but trying to run the command
given by the mentioned script gave me a qemu oops.  All the other
references seemed to be for using slackware as the host, typically to
run windows VMs.

 After that I downloaded Fatdog64 (latest) - that gave me a desktop,
but no mouse (and again mostly no keyboard outside qemu), and
although I could use left or right arrows to select tabs on
something (I think 'enter' had let me open whatever it was), I could
not find any way of starting an install.  No idea if I would have
liked it, or managed to find a tex binary, it was just a failed
attempt to get some sort of x86_64 guest running.

 So - any advice on what NOT to use / what is easy to install /
hints for taming various distros ?  It was a real disappointment not
getting slackware64 to install/boot, because texlive is part of its
full install and I would be interested to see what they had, and (if
the fonts are present) where they put them.

 Thanks for listening.

ĸen
-- 
Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady.
Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m.
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