Simplicity is a form of art...

Mounting QEMU images

While working on the second edition of my first book, SELinux System Administration - Second Edition I had to test out a few commands on different Linux distributions to make sure that I don't create instructions that only work on Gentoo Linux. After all, as awesome as Gentoo might be, the Linux world is a bit bigger. So I downloaded a few live systems to run in Qemu/KVM.

Some of these systems however use cloud-init which, while interesting to use, is not set up on my system yet. And without support for cloud-init, how can I get access to the system?

Qemu-KVM monitor tips and tricks

When running KVM guests, the Qemu/KVM monitor is a nice interface to interact with the VM and do specific maintenance tasks on. If you run the KVM guests with VNC, then you can get to this monitor through Ctrl-Alt-2 (and Ctrl-Alt-1 to get back to the VM display). I …