[Fedora-xen] guest debian on fedora host with virt-manager

[Henning Sprang]

On 1/25/07, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange at redhat.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately the Debian trees are not setup in a way which allows us to do
> paravirtualized Xen installs from virt-manager[1]. So for Debian you'll have to
> use full-virt instead, or run the Debian bootstrap scripts to manually create
> a DomU image.

Just for the records, also on this list(same question came to
xen-users): one cannot throw just any mirror in any installer and hope
it works.
Different distributions do not only have a different mirror setup,
these two don't even use the same package type. So it's really asking
too much to just feed the mirror address in.

But I think saying "the debian mirror is not set up right" is a bit
short sighted, and has the tendency to sound like "debian is wrong",
while one could also argue "virt-manager is not good enough to handle
debian" - both are wrong, because from both sides, these things cannot
be easily expected - bootstraping is complex.

For those who want to bootstrap Debian VMs on Fedora:
I was quite successful running debootstrap and xen-tools installed
from sources, or with an rpm created with alien, (which is
unforunately only available in Debian and SuSE)

Still, one problem remains unsolved, it is described in the thread

"Getting Debian domU running on fedora with fedora-native packages
(works with xensource binaries) "

And it basically means, you can create the system image, but with the
Fedora Xen packages, it just doesn't boot, while the exact same image
runs 100% flawless with Xensource Xen binaries on fedora.

> Not much help for your situation, but we're prototyping support for installing
> SuSE paravirt guests from virt-manager, now we've identified how their installer
> can be booted under Xen.

It's quite simply documented in some blog on the net - didn't try it
and don't have that link at hand, but I think anyway that running
these full fledged manual installers is not really the best way to go.
Better look at something simple like debootstrap. For example,  yum
installs of SuSE on Fedora also work well, the only problem that keeps
coming up is that Fedora kernel is incompatible with most other
distributions's images - only for SuSE at least it works after some
tweaking while the debian problem mentioned above is, at least for me,
still unsolved.

Henning