Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: October 2, 2003

  • The Xen Virtual Machine Monitor

    Xen:

    Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. We have a fully functional port of Linux 2.4 running over Xen, and regularly use it for running demanding applications like MySQL, Apache and PostgreSQL. Any Linux distribution should run unmodified over the ported OS.

    This is excellent news for those of us who would like to tinker with server/OS virtualization but don’t have the dough to throw down for VMWare Server or other high dollar software packages.

    Aparently you can run pretty much any Linux distro on top of Xen, and they are also very close to a port of WindowXP that would work on top of Xen.  You can download a demo CD and check it out.

    This is truly cool stuff.

  • The Laptop Has Landed

    My new laptop dropped by around 4:30 yesterday afternoon.  I managed to repartition the drive (after defragmenting and CHKDSKing) in a non-distructive way (nods: Partition Magic).  So far the current plan is to leave about 20 gigs for the XP install, 10 gigs for a FAT32 drive that I can easily access from XP and Linux, and the remaining 7 gigs for Linux.

    This brings me to my current dilemma: which distro should go on it?  I have a feeling that I might go through several before I find one that works well and that I really like.  It looks like Red Hat 9.0 works with only minor niggles.  SuSE 8.2 also works pretty well.  Of course the Broadcomm Wi-Fi chip doesn’t work, but I wasn’t expecting it to.  Mandrake 9.1 works with minor issues.  The latest Red Hat Beta might be a good place to look.

    It looks like no matter which way I go, something isn’t going to work quite right, but overall it should function.  Of course I’d really like to run something that doesn’t deal with RPMs, such as Debian or Gentoo.  So far I haven’t been able to dig up any information about running these distros on the ze4430us.

    I can be my own mobile install party!