In general, does one need to build the guest images using the same OS as the host? All the tutorials I have seen show building fc5 guests on fc5, debian guests on debian, etc. I want to build a debian guest from an fc5 host. While facile with fc5, I don''t know that much about debian, but it seems like debconf is unlikely to run on fc5. Can anyone point me to a good tutorial or howto on these kinds of issues? (The most promising tutorial hosted at http://xen.cosi.clarkson.edu/documentation/xen-tutorial.html seems dead...) -bd _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 08:45:36AM -0700, Bad Dog wrote:> In general, does one need to build the guest images using the same OS as > the host?In general no, however it is often *easier* to do so. The reason for this is that there aren''t often the tools to install another distribution in an automated fashion into a block device which can be used. e.g. On a Debian host it is possible to install a new instance of Debian using the ''debootstrap'' package - this literally downloads all the Debian base packages and sets up a minimal system. Similarly SuSE allows you to use Yast to install a new instance of SuSE within a single directory by a similar process. However there are exceptions. Debian has a package called ''rpmstrap'' which is designed to allow you to configure an installation of RPM-derived distributions into a directory. This can be used to install a copy of CentOS 4 for example. The xen-tools software manages to wrap both these installation methods up into a simple process.> All the tutorials I have seen show building fc5 guests on > fc5, debian guests on debian, etc. I want to build a debian guest from > an fc5 host. While facile with fc5, I don''t know that much about > debian, but it seems like debconf is unlikely to run on fc5.Right, and that is the problem. The general purpose solution is to install Qemu, then using Qemu install an arbitary operating system into a disk image - this image can then be mounted later and used as a Xen instance. This is slow though, and fiddling with partitions to extract something usable from the Qemu disk image can be annoying.. Steve -- # Xen-Tools 2.x. # Newer. Shinier. Better. http://xen-tools.org/ _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
On Tuesday 20 June 2006 16:45, Bad Dog wrote:> In general, does one need to build the guest images using the same OS as > the host? All the tutorials I have seen show building fc5 guests on > fc5, debian guests on debian, etc. I want to build a debian guest from > an fc5 host. While facile with fc5, I don''t know that much about > debian, but it seems like debconf is unlikely to run on fc5. > > Can anyone point me to a good tutorial or howto on these kinds of > issues? (The most promising tutorial hosted at > http://xen.cosi.clarkson.edu/documentation/xen-tutorial.html seems > dead...) > > -bd > > > > _______________________________________________ > Xen-users mailing list > Xen-users@lists.xensource.com > http://lists.xensource.com/xen-usersHi, If you wish to I can give you an xen install of an debian sarge. I already have an disk image from a debian sarge, which I use to deploy new virtual servers. It''s a 300Mb download. If you want it, tell me, and tomorrow i make it avaliable. Regards hugo _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users