bad iteraction between -daemonize and -nographic $ qemu -daemonize -nographic $ _ After this, the terminal is switched to some weird mode, not processing cr/lf, and not showing the characters being typed (it is fixable by using `stty sane'). Something is seriously wrong here: When -daemonize is given, qemu not touch tty parameters at all. Thanks, /mjt FWIW, it has been present at least since version 0.10 of qemu, and still present in current 1.1 version. According to the Debian bug tracker, this has been fixed with this upstream commit: http://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=commit;h=ab51b1d568e02c80b1abf9016bda3a86dc1db389 ... so let's close this now.