It didn't work for me in not-a-vm either. Hmm.

Ctrl-C in the terminal that's running qemu does the trick for me. Ctrl-A, X only works in “nographics" mode, which we're not using. You can also do Ctrl-Alt-2 in the qemu window to bring up the monitor and enter quit.

Ah ha!

Hmmm neither works for me running on Mac using the VM specified in the vagrant file.

I ran into this issue as well. @rylev, thanks for pgrep qemu | xargs kill -15. Also, I don't know if this is related but when I try to start qemu with qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom os.iso it exits saying Could not initialize SDL(No available video device) - exiting. This can be avoided using the -curses flag.

As a note, Ctrl-Alt didn't work for me, I had to use Esc instead

Esc+2 ( or alt+2 ) works for me. This switches consoles where you can use the quit command

So, I'm gonna say that we should mention that alt-2 + quit works, and that this is a book issue. Moving it over to that repo!