You can compile qemu for youself and install it into your home directory. There will be no kernel-mode qemu accelerator, but the qemu will work and the speed will be rather high.
Qemu has two options for non-gui start: http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-doc.html
2.3.4 Display options:
-nographic
- Normally, QEMU uses SDL to display the VGA output. With this option, you can totally disable graphical output so that QEMU is a simple command line application. The emulated serial port is redirected on the console. Therefore, you can still use QEMU to debug a Linux kernel with a serial console.
-curses
- Normally, QEMU uses SDL to display the VGA output. With this option, QEMU can display the VGA output when in text mode using a curses/ncurses interface. Nothing is displayed in graphical mode.
Also it can send graphic output to another machine via VNC protocol (-vnc option)