So, I've finally got around to trying to play with qemu. Thanks to Bruce, and particularly Pierre, for sharing their setups a little while ago, I've now got my first example almost usable (-cpu host -smp 4 -vga std). This is just a throwaway example while I work out what might be useful for me. But I'm having problems reading it!
My monitor is 1600x1200. I downloaded xubuntu i386 (plain debian CDs seem to need a vast collection of CD images, and I was not sure how well the network would work (in fact, it is fine)). When I see the tty emulation (booting, shutting down) it is readable, but a little feint. But of course I cannot use a tty in the running system [ Ctrl-Alt-Fn drps the _host_ back to a tty ]. After a lot of fiddling about, with apparently random results, I've got a 100x40 rxvt-unicode terminal (the default xfce term insisted on maintaining its transparent background, although it did accept my choice of colours - the result was totally unusable). If I zoom in so that the 1024x768 screen occupies my whole 1600x1200, with some black space around it, I can just about use the urxvt term. Along the way, I tried using what I regard as "good" xft (freetype) fonts, but they either came out excessivily big, or excessively small, depending on how I specified them. I'm now not specifiying ANY fonts, so I assume this is by default using traditional Xorg fonts. For lower-case they are just about readable, but words in capitals look really horrible, like one of those 1970s "computer" fonts with verticals that change from thin, via a couple of curves, to thick - I assume that is an optical illusion, but it ain't exactly easy to read. So, for the first question: any recommendations on configuring terms in qemu ? This xubuntu install is really weird (text, and what I suppose are icons, on the panel are almost unreadable), although perhaps slightly better with 'vga' than with 'cirrus', so it might not be the best way forward (I cannot see how to get to another desktop, clicking in the panel seems rather random - and I've just about got used to xfce on other machines, so I know that putting the desktops on the panel is useful in normal circumstances). Or is there a better setting, e.g. for -vga, which will make things legible ? Note that the login screen, with white text on black backgrounds, looks very good in qemu - it's only when I get to a desktop that I have trouble reading it. What definitely is giving me problems at the moment is copy and paste. Within qemu I can copy from firefox to rxvt-unicode., but when I try to paste _from_ qemu to the host, I mostly get whatever I last pasted on the host. On one occasion I got the first part of what I wanted (probably had not pasted on the host at that stage), and pasting from the host to qemu fails completely. Are either of those fixable, or just something I'll have to live with if I use qemu in anger ? TIA for any useful suggestions. ĸen -- Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady. Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
