[TriLUG] Xubuntu 12.10 as KVM guest gotcha

[Kevin Otte]

I know Xubuntu 12.10 is less than an hour out of the gate, but by the 
power of Bittorrent I have my copy and have installed it in a KVM guest 
to start checking it out. I wanted to share the first gotcha I had out 
of the gate just so noone else freaks out.

Once the installation is complete, I booted up and tried to log in. I 
authenticated successfully, but I was dragged back to the login prompt 
seconds later. A brief check of the logs showed the X server was 
crashing with SIGABRT.

The workaround in this case is to change the virtual video card type. 
The default is 'cirrus', and the best option I could find from the docs 
is 'vmvga'. This presents a VMWare style video card to the guest, which 
is pretty well understood. The only disadvantage is you start up in 
800x600, which doesn't give you much real estate. A quick call to xrandr 
will fix you right up (which does unfortunately have to be done on each 
startup).

xrandr --output default --mode 1024x768

Happy hacking!
-- Kevin