how can you install a KVM guest os in nographic mode

Question

I need to install a KVM guest OS but without the use of a GUI. What I found so far:

create a disk image for the guest

qemu-img create -f qcow2 vdisk.img 10G

install the guest OS

qemu-system-x86_64 -hda vdisk.img -cdrom /path/to/boot-media.iso \ 
   -boot d  -m 1024 -localtime -clock unix -nographic

Adding in the nographic paramater will disable the video output and I'll see nothing; I would have expected some output to be redirected to the console, but I get nothing.

I tried replacing -nographic with -curses but that did not help either.

So the question stands: can you install an guess OS in kvm without a GUI?

Answer 1

eventually I figured it out; It can be done using a vnc connection. Use the following options:

-nographic -vnc your_server_ip:1 -k en-us

This will start a vnc server to which you can connect from another machine using a vnc client.

Answer 2

sudo mount -o loop image.iso tmp/ This step will mount the disk image to a tmp directory. copy the vmlinuz and initrd inside tmp to a directory. You may use the find command to search the paths of files. The file location depends on the distribution. For example, for ubuntu 19.10 the path are tmp/casper/initrd and tmp/casper/vmlinuz. add -nographic -append console=ttyS0 \ -kernel path/to/vmlinuz \ -initrd path/to/initrd to the qemu command, and then you can install the vm with command text only.

Hope this helps.