Jtdcftul

I've installed Ubuntu 16.04 Desktop on QEMU, but now when I start it with:

qemu-system-i386 -m 1024M -enable-kvm -drive file=./ubuntu-desktop.img,index=0,media=disk,format=raw

I see this picture:

Whats going on? How can I fix this?

Working Ubuntu 18.04 setup

Tested in an Ubuntu 18.10 host.

ubuntu-18.04.1-desktop-amd64.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash



set -eux



# Parameters.

id=ubuntu-18.04.1-desktop-amd64

disk_img="${id}.img.qcow2"

disk_img_snapshot="${id}.snapshot.qcow2"

iso="${id}.iso"



# Get image.

if [ ! -f "$iso" ]; then

  wget "http://releases.ubuntu.com/18.04/${iso}"

fi



# Go through installer manually.

if [ ! -f "$disk_img" ]; then

  qemu-img create -f qcow2 "$disk_img" 1T

  qemu-system-x86_64 

    -cdrom "$iso" 

    -drive "file=${disk_img},format=qcow2" 

    -enable-kvm 

    -m 2G 

    -smp 2 

  ;

fi



# Snapshot the installation.

if [ ! -f "$disk_img_snapshot" ]; then

  qemu-img 

    create 

    -b "$disk_img" 

    -f qcow2 

    "$disk_img_snapshot" 

  ;

fi



# Run the installed image.

qemu-system-x86_64 

  -drive "file=${disk_img_snapshot},format=qcow2" 

  -enable-kvm 

  -m 2G 

  -smp 2 

  -soundhw hda 

  -vga virtio 

  "$@" 

;

GitHub upstream.

This script will do two QEMU runs:

• first an installation run. Gets kipped if already done.


• then a regular boot

The fist time QEMU comes up

• Install Ubuntu


• continue, continue, continue...


• wait a few minutes


• at the end "Restart now"


• now you can close the QEMU window

The installer looks like this:

After the install is complete, the script automatically takes a snapshot, and starts a regular boot.

Anytime you want to go back to the pristine install, just remove the snapshot and re-run the script:

rm ubuntu-18.04-desktop-amd64.snapshot.qcow2

./ubuntu-18.04.1-desktop-amd64.sh

and the snapshot will be re-generated starting from the clean install.

The snapshot only stores the diffs between the original image, and so it does not take a lot of disk space.

This setup has by default a funky system that automatically resizes the guest resolution to best fit the QEMU window size, just either:

• drag the window with the mouse


• toggle fullscreen with Ctrl + Alt + F or or start QEMU with -full-screen
  

Notes:

• -vga virtio option is to be able to get higher resolutions: https://superuser.com/questions/132322/how-to-increase-the-visualized-screen-resolution-on-qemu-kvm/1331924#1331924 Toggle full screen with:




• -soundhw hda enables sound. Why does not QEMU enable it by default beats me.



• 
  

  Once inside the VM, reduce the GRUB menu wait time and show some boot messages for next boot with:

  
  
  

  printf 'GRUB_TIMEOUT=1nGRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""n' | sudo tee -a /etc/default/grub
  
  sudo update-grub
  
  

  
  


• 
  

  TODO clipboard sharing:

  
  
  
  
  
  • https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/109117/virt-manager-copy-paste-functionality-to-the-vm
  
  
  • How can I copy&paste from the host to a KVM guest?
  
  
  • https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#SPICE
  
  
  • https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/SPICE
  
  
  
  

  Tried -spice port=5930,disable-ticketing + remote-viewer spice://127.0.0.1:5930, and spice-vdagent is pre-installed on guest, but no success.

  
  
  

  The root cause of the mess is that QEMU devs seem more focused on non-interactive usage, rather than implementing things like this reliably and therefore killing VirtualBox once and for all: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/614958

  
  



• TODO: host 3D acceleration. Still with SPICE and QXL, glxgears gives 1k FPS, and the exact same with regular SDL. But on host __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=0 vblank_mode=0 glxgears gives 20k FPS, so I'm guessing graphics were not accelerated?

Related: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/108122/installing-ubuntu-13-0-desktop-in-qemu

Tested on an Ubuntu 18.04 host, QEMU 1:2.11+dfsg-1ubuntu7.3, nvidia-384 version 390.48-0ubuntu3, Lenovo ThinkPad P51, NVIDIA Corporation GM107GLM [Quadro M1200 Mobile] GPU.

Server and -nographic

Didn't work our, asked at: How to boot and install the Ubuntu server image on QEMU -nographic without the GUI?

Prebuilt bootable images

If you want an image that boots without the need for any interaction on the installer, see: Is there any prebuilt QEMU Ubuntu image(32bit) online?