When running QEMU 0.8.1 under Novell’s Xgl Xserver, the QEMU window black background turns transparent, which makes extremely difficult to read anything on it.

Searching on the Internet, I found a workaround which consists on launching QEMU with the XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS variable set to 1. For example:

XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 qemu -hda ...

I hope this will be fixed in a later release of either QEMU or Novell’s Xgl Xserver.