Connect to a qube's console

In some cases it’s not possible to use a standard graphical terminal emulator to interact with a VM. In this case, “serial console” access is still available using two tools.

qvm-console-dispvm

Usage: qvm-console-dispvm VMNAME

Launches a DispVM connected to the VM’s console, using the qubes.ShowInTerminal RPC service. This provides a full-featured console.

At the time of writing this command contains a bug whose fix is waiting on release, therefore it may be necessary to use the following.

xl console

Usage: sudo xl console VMNAME

Uses Xenlight to directly access the VM console from dom0. For security reasons this console is deliberately limited in what it can display.

Line-by-line text will work fine, but if a Curses-style pseudo-graphical-interface comes up the output will be garbled and you will need a tool like asciinema to untangle it. You may need to substitute all dots followed by [, ], ( or ) to the ASCII ESC (0x1b) character, a method that could have false positives.


This document was migrated from the qubes-community project
  • Page archive
  • First commit: 19 Oct 2019. Last commit: 20 Oct 2019.
  • Applicable Qubes OS releases based on commit dates and supported releases: 4.0
  • Original author(s) (GitHub usernames): awokd, invalid-email-address
  • Original author(s) (forum usernames): N/A
  • Document license: GPLv2