On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 09:35:57AM +0100, Michael Kress wrote:

Hi, I'm not able to get a text console install of any distribution (CentOS-5.2 for example). I'm using the following command: virt-install -n myname -f myimage.img -s 10 -c /iso/CentOS-5.2-x86_64-bin-DVD.iso --accelerate -r 1024 --hvm --nographics The vnc version of this command works flawlessly, but I'd like this host to be a headless one. The installation seems to start as I can see the instance with state "running" with the following command: virsh -c qemu:///system list But all I see is the following messages: ======================== Starting install... Creating domain... Connecting to uri: qemu:///system ======================== After a while there's one strange character showing up in the console.

When you specify --hvm, --nographics, then there is no graphical console configured. The only way of interacting with the guest is via the serial port, but most OS (CentOS included) will not put a console on the serial port by default. To make this work you need to use the --location arg instead of the --cdrom / -c arg, but still give a path tot he ISO image. THis will cause it to directly boot off the kernel+initrd. Now also add then --extra-args flag, with a value 'console=ttyS0' which will make the serial port the default guest console for install Daniel -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|