Debian – Booting a Debian Live ISO on QEMU

debiannetbootopenzfsqemu

Situation:

A server:

  • access only via SSH (no physical access, no KVM)
  • a netboot OS (Debian/Jessie)
  • 3 x 2T HDD
  • 16G RAM

Final goal:

Building a ZFS pool with the local HDD and install Debian on a ZFS root, the netboot OS is missing packages to install ZFS via apt, that's why I want to boot a Live Debian.

Issue:

  1. I wget the debian-live-11.0.0-amd64-standard.iso on /tmp
  2. I installed QEMU (via apt) and the plethora of options confuses me (I am discovering it). My most advanced attempt is this:
qemu-system-x86_64 -curses -net nic -net user -m 1024M
    -drive file=/tmp/11-live-amd64-std.iso,media=cdrom -boot c

The -curses option gives a correct result with an install iso, when the 640 x 480 Graphic mode message appears, I use <esc> to access the boot: menu of grub and I pass it the install vga=normal fb=false options and it goes (screenshot)

But with the Live iso, it doesn't work (screenshot)

These are my questions:

  1. Did I miss any QEMU option(s) to display the output that is not supposed to be graphical with this standard iso?
  2. Do I need to configure my live iso with (e.g.) a GRUB in console mode?
  3. Will I not be able to configure the port forwarding of QEMU to access the console via SSH or telnet?
  4. Is there any other solution (without QEMU)?

Thanks in advance

Best Answer

I fix this issue by using -vnc & -nographic options.

Here the final command:

qemu-system-x86_64 -nographic -net nic -net user -m 1024M -drive file=/tmp/11-live-amd64-std.iso,media=cdrom -boot c -vnc :0

With this, the machine is reachable with a VNC client.

Related Topic