=== QuickStart

If you are completely new to `qemu`, you may find the big list of switches a
bit confusing. Most users want to install an operating system from a cdrom
image to a virtual harddisk. Here is what you need:

----------------------------------
$ qemu-img create foo.img 8G
$ wget http://server.com/bar.iso
$ qemu -hda foo.img -cdrom bar.iso
----------------------------------

=== Guest-agent

The guest agent service is started automatically, as long as the
`qemu-guest` subpackage is installed. See
http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Qemu_guest_agent[here] for setup
instructions.

=== Tricks

It worth to read the full documentation at
`/usr/share/doc/qemu-*/qemu-doc.html`, it really worth to do so.

To demonstrate how powerful `qemu` is, here are a few cheap tricks:

If you want to be able to ssh to the machine, you can use port redirection. For
example using the `-redir tcp:1022::22` option, `qemu:22` will be available at
`localhost:1022`.

NOTE: This requires `root` privileges.

You can create a unix socket to control your virtual machine. For example if
you are not able to ssh to the machine, you can still properly shut it down:

Use the `-monitor unix:/tmp/qemu,server,nowait` option, then send the `sendkey
ctrl-alt-delete` string to the socket, for example using python:

----
python -c "import socket; sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_UNIX, socket.SOCK_STREAM); \
sock.connect('/tmp/qemu'); \
sock.send('sendkey ctrl-alt-delete\n')"
----

Finally a trick about vnc: using for example the `-vnc 0` option, it's possible
to reach qemu's display via vnc. This is quite handy if you run qemu on a
server (for example in screen), then you can freely attach to and detach from
it whenever you want to do so.

Really, read the full documentation! :)

// vim: ft=asciidoc