How to run kvm/qemu on a virtual terminal with kms enabled

I deduce from the kvm howtos that this should actually work with sdl and a framebuffer, but I can't get it going. Doing kvm -cdrom tinycore-current.iso with normal user account on a virtual terminal gives:

kvm: pci_add_option_rom: failed to find romfile "pxe-rtl8139.bin"
init kbd.
init mouse failed.
Could not initialize SDL(Unable to open mouse) - exiting

While it works flawlessly under X.

Running it with sudo prepended crashes display and keyboard.

So what can I do?

2 Answers

As the error message states, SDL cannot access the mouse. If this error doesn't show as root (using sudo), this is probably a permissions problem. You should check the permissions of /dev/input/mice.

It is likely that once the mouse problem is fixed it will show the same behaviour as when run using sudo. It might not be worth the trouble to try getting it running with framebuffer. Without knowing the details I'd say using X might a better solution.

First issue :

means you have no pxe bootrom images installed. try installing them, or look them up in /usr/share/qemu or /usr/share/gpxe

sudo apt-file search pxe-rtl8139.bin

says that this file is in the kvm-pxe package. So will fix your problem.

sudo aptitude install kvm-pxe

2nd Issue

If SDL is complaining because it can't find any mouse (Unable to init SDL: Unable to open mouse) then, before launching the program, do:

export SDL_NOMOUSE=1