Just use these images: http://people.debian.org/~aurel32/qemu/arm/
edit the host system's /etc/inittab and add
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAMA0 9600 vt100
and /etc/securetty and add
ttyAMA0
Boot with:
$ qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -kernel vmlinuz-2.6.18-6-versatile -initrd initrd.gz -hda hda.img -append "root=/dev/ram console=ttyAMA0" -nographic -net nic,model=rtl8139,vlan=1,macaddr=52:54:00:12:34:56