Re: Any advice on installing linux qemu guests ?

On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 12:03:40AM +0000, Ken Moffat wrote:
> 
>  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.
> 
 Replying to myself since this list is now mostly a blog which
nobody will admit to reading, but which google still indexes.

 For slackware64, the package install had failed catastrophically, I
assume that either lilo or something it depends on (bin86) had not
got installed.  Nothing to do with lilo not working.

 I later managed to install i486 slackware, and for that I used the
'terse' option on the packages - far more useful than a panel per
package, and it worked.

 On that I got an xfce desktop, but again the mouse failed as soon
as I clicked, and I had to go to a tty and kill qemu.  Initially that
seemed to be down to my window manager (icewm) - for most things it
installs commented files which show the default settings, but for
~/.icewm/keys it does not install anything.  I eventually discovered
the Ctrl-Alt-G command might be useful, but on icewm without qemu
that just opened up the gimp!  Adding ~/.icewm/keys with a single
commented line solved that.  I could then run Ctrl-Alt-G when
clicking the mouse in qemu caused problems.

 Unfortunately, it did not make the mouse buttons _work_ so I still
had  to use the keyboard, with limited functionality.

 A few hours ago I found a pointer to '-usb -usbdevice tablet' : I
had tried part of that before, but I think without the -usb part.
Adding it all gave me a working mouse in 32-bit slackware, and also
in Fatdog64 (but I still could not see how to _install_ that one, so
I lost interest in it).

 Back to slackware64 - using the terse variant for the packages, it
installed and booted, and my user has a working xfce desktop.
Unfortunately, my hopes that tex on slack would be useful were
dashed - it still installs tetex, none of the modern things which
I've had to learn for testing texlive, and even my basic pdflatex
test fails (missing stylesheet for the lorem ipsum cod latin that
_everybody_ uses).  Looks as if I'll have to get my head around
slackbuilds : what sort of distro is it where you have to compile
things ?

[ for anyone finding this via google: that was a joke, this is LFS
so compiling is normal for us ]

ĸen, happy at last (ooh, and I found some interesting fonts in
(x)ubuntu and slackware - need to do more testing of my tex scripts
;-)
-- 
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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