Ian Jackson wrote:
[...]
> Also, while I'm here: I've been having quite some difficulty getting a
> working OpenSUSE Xen guest install. Is there a recommended procedure
> for this when the host is not OpenSUSE ? (In my case the host is
> Debian etch.)
The paravirtualized Xen kernel and initrd with installation system are located
in /boot/<arch> directory on the medium (files vmlinuz-xen and initrd-xen).
The initrd contains linuxrc, the installation loader which loads root filesystem
image (from /boot/<arch>/root) which contains the installer (Yast). Use
'install=<URL>' kernel parameter or manually select the installation repository
using the linuxrc text menu.
> For many other distributions there are ways of running what amounts to
> a port of the installer directed at a filesystem tree, but just as a
> normal program on the host; so for example with Fedora and Centos one
> uses rinse, and for Debian derivatives debootstrap does the job (and
> all of these tools seem to be readily portable). Is there an
> analogous tool for OpenSUSE ?
There is a yast module for installing system into a directory ('yast2
dirinstall').
> In the absence of such a utility I've been trying to install OpenSUSE
> as an HVM (fully virtualised rather than paravirtualised) guest but
> have been having serious trouble: so far a couple of annoying bugs in
> the Xen emulations (which I've got past) and now I have a bug where
> the installer's kernel gets very upset with the emulated IDE
> controller.
>
> Is installing OpenSUSE as a Xen HVM guest (or indeed as a PV guest)
> expected to work ? Can it be sensibly done without the use of
> difficult-to-port hostside management tools from OpenSUSE ?
I successfully used virt-manager (included in openSUSE 10.3) for installing
paravirtualized openSUSE 10.3.
I just selected "openSUSE" OS type and source ISO image. It extracts the
required files from the ISO image and starts the installation in a VM
automatically.
Yast supports paravirtualized installation well (e.g. it installs kernel-xen
instead of kernel-default and so on...).
I prefer using virt-manager to the dirinstall module because dirinstall just
installs packages, the installer also configures the network, user accounts,...
And you don't have to create and configure the VM manually, it has a nice GUI.
Ladislav
--
Best Regards
Ladislav Slezák
Yast Developer
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