Re: [Xen-users] Debian guest on FC5 host (nubie alert)

[Steve Kemp <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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/

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