[xen-tools] Notes from Fedora

[Asheesh Laroia]

At acm.jhu.edu we have a Fedora Core 5 Xen host (*).  I've installed 
xen-tools 2.0 from http://xen-tools.org/software/xen-tools/releases.html 
by untarring it and "make install"ing.

These are the notes I took while making xen-tools work for creating Debian 
guests.

I had to use CPAN to install Template::Text.

I had to hardcode in debootstrap the line "ARCH=i386" because I couldn't 
seem to get xen-tools to pass "--arch i386" to debootstrap.

I followed 
http://www.underhanded.org/papers/debian-conversion/remotedeb.html to the 
http://azhrarn.underhanded.org/debootstrap-0.2.23-1.i386.rpm RPM, which I 
installed.  It appeared to consistently fail (while bootstrapping Sarge, 
which is all I tried) with the message "E: Couldn't download 
gcc-3.2-base".  I tried switching mirrors and doing:

# mkdir -p /var/lib/apt/lists
# mkdir -p /var/cache/apt/archives/

But it still failed the same way.  Eventually I just "alien"ed the current 
debootstrap from Unstable and that worked (with the hard-coded ARCH).

I'll ask a question in another thread about xen-tools that relates to this 
fact: The guests wouldn't boot with the Fedora xenU initrd set.  When I 
simply removed the initrd line from the installed .cfg file and all was 
well!

So, thanks Steve and others who have contributed to this; I can get my 
Debian fix despite the Fedora host system here.

-- Asheesh.

*. Running the server on Fedora Core 5 wasn't my idea. (-;

-- 
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