So with my new disk, and my server back online, I went ahead and re-installed my web server VM, and the newer install from the netcd is graphical of all things.

Ugh.

If anyone cares, here is how I do this, the old cli way. I don’t like weird manager things, I’m capable of hitting flags myself:

kvm -m 640 -nographic -curses -hda blog.vmdk -cdrom /install/debian-7.8.0-i386-netinst.iso -boot d -vnc 10.12.0.1:23 -net nic,vlan=0,macaddr=52:54:00:11:11:23 -net tap,vlan=0,ifname=tap0,script=/etc/qemu-ifup

very simple, right?

So the ‘solution’ to this is quite simple hit escape a few times, and the screen will repaint, and you should get the grub boot prompt

So simply type in:

install vga=normal fb=none

And hit enter, and you should now be good to go!

I guess I can go over some quick guide to setting up the tun/tap bridging.  This section is to be added to /etc/network/interfaces

iface br0 inet static
address 10.12.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 10.12.0.0
broadcase 10.12.0.255
bridge_fd 9
bridge_hello 2
bridge_maxage 12
bridge_stp off
pre-up brctl addbr br0
post-down brctl delbr br0

And the qemu-ifup script:

# cat /etc/qemu-ifup
#!/bin/sh

echo “Executing /etc/qemu-ifup”
echo “Bringing up $1 for bridged mode…”
sudo /sbin/ifconfig $1 0.0.0.0 promisc up
echo “Adding $1 to br0…”
sudo /sbin/brctl addif br0 $1
sleep 2

thats about it.  Debian 8, was just released, and I suspect all of this will have changed.