[Fedora-xen] Ubuntu as DomU under Xen/FC5

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 04:11:07PM -0700, George Hill wrote:
> I have FC5 running Xen, or perhaps it is the other way
> 'round, as Dom0. I have installed another copy of FC5
> as a DomU, no problem. Now I am want to install Ubuntu
> as another guest. The instructions that I have read
> are all for installing Ubuntu on a system running
> Xen/Ubuntu and use debootstrap to boot the system. But
> debootstrap is a Debian package -- how would I run it
> under FC5? Or, simply, how could I go about installing
> Ubuntu under FC5/Xen? Thanks.

Its unfortunate that most other distros seem to have gone in the direction
of using some bootstrap / chroot method to installs guest FS images, because
its pretty much doomed to fail in a mixed host/guest environment such as
Ubuntu on Fedora. This is why the Fedora approach to creating guests has 
been to boot the regular installer (anaconda) using a xen guest kernel - it
lets people easily install Fedora guests on non-Fedora hosts.

There's a couple of options I can think of

  - Try and boot the Ubuntu installer using the Ubuntu  Xen guest kernel
    and hope it 'just works'.
  - Run the Ubuntu installer inside QEMU instance, and then install the
    kernel-xen inside QEMU. Finally shutdown QEMU & create  a Xen config
    file to boot the image created via QEMU
  - Use a bare-metal Ubuntu host to create the image & then copy it across
    to the Fedora host to run within Xen
  - Manually install debootstrap from sources on Fedora & see if you can
    get it working

If the first option doesn't work it'd be worth creating a bug report for
Debian recommending they try & get it working, because booting regular
installer with a xen guest kernel is by far the most portable way of 
creating guest images in mixed environments, since its totally isolated
from whatever the host happens to run.

Regards,
Dan.
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