This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Assuming your builders type is qemu, you may have seen this:

Qemu stderr: Could not initialize SDL(No available video device) - exiting

One solution in the Packer json was to disable graphics:

qemuargs: [ "-nographics" ]

Alternatively, start it headless:

"headless": "true"

If you’ve set the following, you’ll be able to VNC remotely instead. When porting back to Xen, change your /etc/ttys so you can use the serial console as well.