I'm having problems trying to install CentOS as a KVM guest despite following the wikis and howtos. The problem is that most of the instructions skip the part that happens after virt-install... It seems that something blindingly obvious happens if nothing goes wrong and most instructions continues from the OS installation screen. However, when I try this, I get a blank console that says "Escape Char is ^]" and doesn't do anything useful. If I specify --vnc options, the blank console doesn't appear but the CentOS guest doesn't respond to VNC connections. I've tried connecting on the public IP, on the LAN IP, on loopback 127.0.0.1, with autoport, with different specified ports, port numbers - 5900 since vnc seems to accept :1 as 5901, enabling qemu to listen on all public interfaces and allowing exceptions in iptables just in case loopback 127.0.0.1 is blocked. But nothing gives me a console/screen that I can install the OS. Or should I expect VNC to work, given that the OS isn't installed, or is it an inbuilt function of KVM? The VM guest appears to be loaded, there are no obvious errors, virsh list shows the VM but I can't do anything with them. It's been really frustrating. Can anybody please point out what's the obvious step or magic trick I'm missing?