Mast Kalandar

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Fri, 19 Sep 2008

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Fedora Core DomU on Debian Etch


debian, fedora, floss, virtualisation [link] [comments ()] [raw]

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.


  1. Thanks go out to Steve Kemp and the maintainers of the Debian packages for their excellent work.


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