Comment 14 for bug 717445

I had a similar problem... Everything works when I set it to use the Cirrus driver, but I wanted to use standard VGA. Working from 'virt-manager', and then looking at the log file in /var/log/libvirt/qemu/vmname.log, I find this:

 kvm: pci_add_option_rom: failed to find romfile "vgabios-stdvga.bin"

I ran 'dpkg --listfiles vgabios', and learned where they are kept. There is a bunch of symlinks... but they are not really in the right place. They are installed in /usr/share/kvm, not /usr/share/qemu. And, if they got installed in /usr/share/qemu, the vgabios package would clash with the qemu-common package, which installs a symlink named 'vga-bios-cirrus.bin'... but not one named 'vgabios-stdvga.bin'. Creating that symlink with:

  cd /usr/share/qemu
  sudo ln -s ../vgabios/vgabios.stdvga.bin vgabios-stdvga.bin

... fixes the problem, and now the virtual machine starts up fine. It has a faster display and higher resolution.