The IMSc recently installed a desktop machine for me that is powerful enough to run Xen virtualised domU's. (My previous desktop machine was removed at my request; explanations at a later date!)
One task was to get Fedora Core running under this Debian Etch machine. Since the information required for this task was rather difficult to find (rant later!), here is a quick 2-paise tip (to borrow a phrase from the linux gazette) on how to get Fedora Core running under a Debian Xen machine.
The helpful packages under Debian are xen-tools
and rinse
.1 Since the latter is only
available with "lenny", this requires an schroot
installation about which I have written elsewhere.
So let me assume that we have a lenny chroot inside the dom0 in
which xen-tools
and rinse
have been
installed.
One can either bind mount /etc/xen
from the dom0
into the lenny chroot or one can just create this directory to
hold the configuration file for the domU to be created. Creating
the domU is as simple as:
xen-create-image --ip=192.168.17.71 --hostname=fedora \ --arch=amd64 --lvm vg0 --install-method rinse \ --dist fedora-core-8
with ip address, hostname, lvm volume group and arch chosen
appropriately. (Be
careful and choose a hostname that does not match a hostname
that you have already used in the same Xen system). This will
create the logical volumes /dev/vg0/fedora-disk
and
/dev/vg0/fedora-swap
containing the appropriate
images for use with the Fedora domU. Before you can boot
into this domU there are some minor issues you need to fix; see
#499476.
The fixes are to create /etc/shadow
and
/etc/gshadow
and set a usable password as follows.
Mount /dev/vg0/fedora-disk
somewhere and chroot to
it. Then run the following commands:
pwconv grpconv passwd root
Then exit the chroot and unmount
/dev/vg0/fedora-disk
and then exit the lenny chroot.
If necessary, copy the file etc/xen/fedora.cfg
from
within the lenny chroot to /etc/xen/
in the dom0.
You should now be ready to boot your Fedora Core 8 domU with
xm create fedora.cfg
It would be nice if one could install Fedora Core 9 the same way; see #499477.
-
Thanks go out to Steve Kemp and the maintainers of the Debian packages for their excellent work. ↩