Further X-periments on Qemu

After installing Qemu and ghci, I needed to run "gobby" to access some mutually edited files. But that needed X. So I could not avoid X altogether. Here is what I did to install X.

First start up Qemu using

$ qemu debinst.qcow

where debinst.qcow is the qemu hard disk which we installed in the previous blog. Log in as root. Now we are ready to do the actual installation.

Do the customary

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade

as root. Though it is not strictly necessary as the following will upgrade whatever it needs automatically.

Now we start the main installation. First we need X.

# apt-get install xorg

This will take some time as it will retrieve something around 40MB of data and then install it. Next one needs a window manager to use the X. I wanted something light and hence went for xfce. I might have used fvwm or something like that. But I used fvwm and blackbox and icewm for quite sometime and wanted to try something new. So I did

# apt-get install xfce4

This will download around 25 MB of data. The installing of fonts might take some time. Now after it is done, comes the scary part of testing it. So keep your fingers crossed and switch over to the full-screen mode by

pressing Ctrl-Alt-f

while the qemu window is in focus. This will grab the whole screen for qemu. Now run

# startxfce4

That should start xfce. I had done a few more installations. I needed the X for gobby. So I had installed gobby. I needed a web browser. w3m was already installed, but I wanted something more graphical. I tried links2. That seems to be reasonable. It can at least handle gmail and the webmail of my institute.