[CentOS] centos 5 beta and xen [ Ram Required ]

John Summerfield debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Wed Mar 14 01:56:17 UTC 2007


Karanbir Singh wrote:
> John Summerfield wrote:
> on=http://RHEL.demo.lan/Fedora/6/i386/os/
> 
>>  That one ran overnight ans was still on the first package. 128 Mbtes 
>> isn't enough for Anaconda, but it tries.
> 
> 
> yeah :(
> 
> We've got some really mixed results with ram usage with the new anaconda 
> yuminstall stuff. You really need about 384MB+ to get a decent package 
> selection to install in GUI mode and about 256MB+ for the text installer.

In my case, 256 was okay. I did a text-mode install (sans colour) 
connected by ssh to the host from another box. It was odd having an 
80x25 window in my 160x64 screen.

Now installed, fc6's kernel just panics, but thats for another place.

A couple of things not to like:
1. Suse has a standard place for guest filesystems, RH does not.
2. Suse sets up a CD drive quite nicely, for RH it seems a little vim is 
needed.
3. Everyone I've tried (SUSE, *ubuntu, RH) sets things up differently 
and incompatibly. I can't easily take my SLED virtual system to Kunbuntu 
or (I suspect) RHEL.

I want to be able to create virtuals of several distros on the same 
system. Ubuntu's closest, i think, it has rpmstrap to bootstrap.

4. Booting a Xen guest is a bit odd. With Virtual PC in Windows, you 
start the vm and uou have the opportunity to tweak BIOS settings, just 
as on real hardware. Then, the BIOS boots a "disk," just like on real 
hardware. It is good enough to run INSERT, a Linux recovery distro.

Red Hat and Suse have some magic to boot the guest's kernel, at least. 
Red Hat's may be better here. Debian/Ubuntu use a kernel from the host 
filesystem: it's a quick way to get Sarge up, albeit with an unsupported 
kernel.

I note there is a BIOS here someplace.

5. RH's disk naming is a bit odd. Suse gives is the good old /dev/hda 
(or hda[1-..] if you don't want partitions.

6. RH seems to only set one disk up. I didn't see a way to define a CD, 
probably a little more vim.

7. The process of booting install media is hidden, and different in each 
case.
8. Xen uses special device drivers. I prefer Virtual PC's emulation of a 
Dec Tulip network card, standard IDE hardware etc. No special drivers 
needed. I can run OS/2 in that!






-- 

Cheers
John

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