[Xen-users] Euphoria and some success

[Geoff Streeter <geoff@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I have been fighting to get my first virtual machine up and running. Here 
is a description of the experience in case it helps someone else.
I have a brand new Dell 9150 with a Pentium D 930.

I dumped SuSE 10.1 on an 8GB partition.
Tried the YAST GUI to install a vm from an Ubuntu disk and gave up.
Put Ubuntu 6.06 on another 8GB partition.

Tried to boot a virtual machine using the physical hard disk but it kept 
failing on the lack of emulation of int 15 Service C0.
Made a large partition for virtual images.

Used the Appendix A from the Xen user's manual as a guide. It is very good 
with some omissions.
I fought with both the SuSE version of grub and the Ubuntu version of grub. 
If you use the SuSE version and make an ext3 partition as suggested then 
grub keeps returning "error 15: File not found" on issuing a setup command. 
If you use the ubuntu version it firstly wants a menu.lst and then always 
seems to issue "error 22: No such partition" when given one.
I got over this by using the SuSE version and making a reiserfs file system.

I needed to restrict the memory for Dom0 - I choose 512MiB (for no good 
reason and it does feel sluggish).
Appendix A has forgotten to mention copying the kernel and the initrd to 
the /boot of the file system.
Once this was done I could start a new virtual machine. Type some 
instructions into grub (there was no menu.lst) and I got ubuntu to boot.
I classed this as some success. I now need to get the virtual machine 
(ubuntu) to use X properly and then get Windows server 2003 on as well. At 
some point I need to take what I have learnt and rebuild the whole machine 
from scratch.
Geoff  

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