On Mon, 2016-04-25 at 15:54 +0100, David Hare wrote:
> I just installed qemu again and successfully booted both the latest
> unmodified Refracta and ExeGNU ISO's, through to the desktop, without
> noticing any significant errors
>
> qemu-system-x86_64 -m 384 -cdrom snapshot_current.iso
>
> "snapshot_current.iso" is a symlink to whatever I'm testing at the time.
>
> Bad news is, it's too slow to be of much use (at least on this box)
> beyond checking the isolinux boot department.

Your CPU need to have virtualization hardware support and if it has add -enable-
kvm to the qemu-system-x86_64 command line.