Re: What keystroke do you use to select tty[1234] in d-i in KVM virt-install console?

[David <bouncingcats@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 at 00:23, Thomas Pircher <thp+debian@p5r.uk> wrote:
> David wrote:

> > My goal is to automate in a VM my testing of various aspects of
> > debian-installer, such as paritioning, and the setup and teardown
> > is faster if the test VM has no GUI so I am using console VM.

> If you can start a tmux session inside your LXTerminal, before
> connecting to the KVM console, then you could use the send-keys function
> in tmux.

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 at 01:00, Thomas Pircher <thomas@p5r.uk> wrote:
> Thomas Pircher wrote:

> > The keystrokes are in tmux are "CTRL-B", followed by ":send-keys M-2",
> > followed by the Enter key, for sending the <Alt>-<2> (Meta-2) key
> > combination.

> Sorry, I realised later that you wanted to send <ALT>-<F2>…
> That would be:
> <CTRL-B>:send-keys M-F2<ENTER>

Hi Thomas,

Thank you for your suggestion! I was quite hopeful it might work but
I find it does not.

tmux is new to me but I have just tested following your instructions.

At the relevant point, I do <ctrl-B>:
and tmux responds by presenting a colon prompt.

Then I type literally the following text:
send-keys M-F4

and when I press <enter> key, the debian-installer behaves
exactly the same as if I just pressed the enter key without
any special tmux actions.

Looking for other things to try, I did:
send-keys -X M-F4
tmax response: "not in a mode"

I also tested in xterm with the same result.

I wonder what I'm doing differently to everyone who has
given me suggestions that surely work for them.

Is it perhaps something to do with what I mentioned in
my first message?
On buster, I run 'virt-install' with debian-installer with
preseed arguments including
    --graphics none
    --extra-args "auto=true priority=critical console=ttyS0 ..."

Note: console=ttyS0

Are the people offering me answers also using that preseed
option?

I know that I can access a shell via the d-i main menu.
I wonder if anyone can suggest how to view the debug messages
from there.

I am aware that d-i allows to save debug logs but the goal I'm hoping
for is to be able to see log messages while I am trying different
commands in a d-i shell.