When you build a KVM guest, if you want to install the guest over the network, you should attach the video console of your guest to a VNC display.
How can I put this..? This is quite a novel way of doing it. I think there’s a reason that more virtualisation systems don’t work in this way. VNC is not great, but I am sure there is a reason that I can’t use a dummy serial port instead. I’d have preferred RDP, but perhaps there’s a reason I can’t use that too.
I normally use Chicken of the VNC as a mac osx client, because it has a funny name, and has always worked. However, it crashes and burns (see screen shot) when trying to install Debian on a KVM guest. Hopefully I can save someone else an evenings’s worth of trying every other mac vnc client, and offer the fix. Just use VNCViewer. I tried this after half a dozen others which all failed in a similar way to Chicken.
Any comments on why RDP or Serial might not have been better welcome.
The main reason you couldn’t use RDP is because it’s an MS protocol. There is only one non-MS implementation in the wild (xrdp), and that only works with X.org via Xvnc anyway.
Posted by craiga | April 6, 2008, 9:05 amAlso, VNC was probably chosen for openness and ubiquity. Most devices have a VNC viewer these days. Using an open protocol rather than writing a custom UI seems like a fairly sensible shortcut. The problem only comes to light because all Mac VNC software sucks as, it seems, you have discovered!
Posted by craiga | April 6, 2008, 9:11 amYou saved one man a night tearing his hair out / trying every client for a night! Thanks dude…
Posted by jkp | September 20, 2008, 12:32 pm