This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on a Debian Sarge (3.1) system. It should apply to Ubuntu systems with little or no modifications.
Tutorial: The Perfect Xen Setup For Debian And Ubuntu
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Tried it. It works fine. Thanks.
XEN is not ready for the prime time yet. I’d suggest wait a couple of months before trying it out.
Any actual reasons behind that defamatory slam or just blowing smoke at a great project?
Well, I tried it and the botom line it did not work. Let me ask you this have you tried it before advocating.
There’s no point having a moderation system on OS News if it’s going to be abused so much. The guy who scored a -4 on this thread was expressing a reasonable opinion. You may think he’s wrong, but it was a reasonable thing to say. The Xen folks themselves have recently asked folks to hold off a little while they add some extra functionality. Moderation is usually only interesting when it’s positive. The negatives are strictly for trolls and nutters. imho.
There’s no point having a moderation system on OS News if it’s going to be abused so much.
Agreed: secondly, it’s frustrating to have a message moderated into oblivion and all the sibling posts sitting their making no sense out of context.
Asked folks to hold off what? Sorry, am not disagreeing, just not sure what you’re referring to 😉
I saw an article recently – can’t recall where at this late hour – which quoted on of the Xen project leaders. Essentially he said that they are working hard to add in extra stuff at the moment, so don’t be too unforgiving of Xen now as it will be better in a couple of months. Which could mean already or now, as these articles often quote things said a while beforehand. However, of course this doesn’t mean that Xen doesn’t work right now or anything like that, as clearly it does.
Ah, OK, that makes sense.
In the past few months quite a lot of changes have gone into Xen 3.0 so that the same API / ABI will be supportable for a long period of time. Previously the Guest <-> Xen interface changed for each new version of Xen.
Once Xen support is in mainline Linux it’d be kinda annoying to have certain versions of Linux only run on certain versions of Xen. The interface should be extensible, so that Xen-enabled kernel will run on new enhanced Xens for a long time into the future.
Things seem to be settling down now but as always the last 10% of the work seems to take 90% of the effort!
He could’ve used a few facts to go with it, or at least one the opinion is based on. I think the moderation thing is working great, it’s the, “More…”, breaking up the continuity of the threads I hate.
I agree. Some facts would have been nice.
Out of interest, did you try Xen 2.0 or Xen 3.0 (-devel)? 3.0 should work on more hardware but laptops are always the hardest to support.
I didn’t get it until Xensource came out and demo’ed it for our user group but yes I have and it seems to work pretty well. Been teaching a little distro to use it out of the box and reworking the installer for a new mode of not require booting the cd but create a minimal build in a directory instead for Xen to use.
Let me be clear here, I try almost anything related to new OS’s before speaking up. Re XEN , I tried FC4 i386 version with XEN 3.0. The stock kernel worked fine however with XEN kernel one of these 3 things happened
1. The machine froze on me
2. The network connection died ( I need to surf to look for help on how to run XEN)
3. The Domain 1 refused to start no matter what I did
Next I tried the Suse 10 implementation and it was a better implementation since my machine didn’t hang that much. But again I found that I was unable to start the Domain 1.
Frustrated I tried the live CD on XEN’s website, which basically ran fine except the Keyboard stopped working. I tried passing nosmp i8042.nomux and all sorts of kernel options bu to no avail.
After getting frustrated I tried the eval version of ESX Server which needed two physical machnies. Since It left you with a Console Windows. My final choice was VMWARE GSX Server which was headless like XEN. And it works on my minimal FC4 for i386.
The advantages that XEN is proposing is lost in the stability/usability issues. Also the support in respect of message boards and forums are limited. And whatever little exists in terms of users interaction talks about high end servers.
> I try almost anything related to new OS’s before
Sure, just checking: Xen 3.0 changes the Xen 2.0 architecture to move more hardware support stuff out into Linux itself. This is probably why the LiveCD didn’t work for you – last time I checked it was based on 2.0.
The original FC4 Xen rpms were a bit dodgy – basically just a snapshot of the development tree at a relatively early time when it was still quite unstable. I generally recommend that people avoid them, although I think they might have been updated subsequently.
SuSE 10 is a rather more recent snapshot and seems to work pretty well for a load of people. What was your problem starting a domU? If the machine runs stably in dom0, getting the domU running *should* (in theory) just be a configuration issue.
It sounds like you’ve had a fairly unlucky experience. Where did you try for support? I don’t imagine there are many Xen people on distro forums, etc. Support on the Xen mailing lists is generally fast and good for most people as long as they post enough information. If you ever try Xen in future, you might want to post there in preference to other forums.
okie dokie, nice one; short, needed info included, if you just follow the steps, it’ll work as presented; more of this kinda stuff would be needed for those who don’t have enough guts to try things by themselves
for the guy above bashing xen and just being modded down into oblivion: xen already rocks big time
Bashing? I don’t think it was bashing at all. Just because you might not agree with a sentiment doesn’t mean it’s bashing.
Personally, I have no opinion either way with regards to Xen. I just find it unfortunate that some people’s comments get moderated down for the wrong reasons. That should be saved for trolling, not for voicing an appropriately stated opinion.
At least thats _my_ opinion.
1. Format HDD
2. Install something else.
3. ???
4. Security!
😉
What are some practical applications for Xen?
Lots of things. The key points are:
* Virtual machines with near native performance
* Live migration virtual machines to another physical host without stopping them
* Excellent hardware support
Useful for software development, testing, virtual server hosting and datacentre management. With live migration and some form of SAN or NAS, the datacentre / cluster management angle becomes rather compelling.
I’m confident Xen has it’s purpose for some.Though i rather prefer Vmware.The latest version runs Ubuntu almost with the same (perceived?) speed as it would have been run natively.Streamtuner has really no windows counterpart as far as i know.Listening to music streams with streamtuner on Ubuntu with Windows XP professional 64-bit as host is a breeze:-).
For me no cigwin,Xen,quemu or whatever gives the experience vmware can give.The only thing that i miss is bttv,dvb-t/c support 🙂