I like virtual box - I run it on my desktop as a sandbox area, and have even gotten a Gentoo distro running under it. I have noticed some stability issues with it since my last upgrade.<br><br>I started futzing around with Xen under CentOS 5.3 on Friday, and didn't have much luck with it. I haven't patched the CentOS box, so a Xen upgrade may help. I was unable to get Xen to recognize several loopback mounted iso distro files (CentOS 5.3, Ubuntu 9.10). Extracting them under a local http directory similarly failed. I'm probably doing something <i>really</i> stupid. I'll be upgrading Xen on Monday to see if that helps.<br>
<br>I will definitely look at Thincrust. <br><br>Stay tuned...<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Jim Lynch <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ale_nospam@fayettedigital.com">ale_nospam@fayettedigital.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im">Brian Pitts wrote:<br>
> On 12/04/2009 01:00 PM, Ty Connell wrote:<br>
><br>
>> Greetings,<br>
>><br>
>> I'm wading into the Xen waters, and I'm interested in testing<br>
>> lightweight / small footprint Linux guest distros. Kind of what I'm<br>
>> looking for is:<br>
>><br>
>> 1. A distro that supports a gui or menu driven installation to the<br>
>> guest "space" (forgive my terminology).<br>
>> 2. Installs only what's necessary for booting and networking, and<br>
>> 3. Supports some kind of package manager installation.<br>
>><br>
>> I don't really want to get into the loop of download source, compile,<br>
>> and configure. Something that works is OK. For example, I'd like to<br>
>> setup a guest OS that has nothing but linux, and the stuff to run<br>
>> postfix. Another guest would run nothing but DNS. Similarly for Apache.<br>
>><br>
>> Test box is older hardware thus limiting what I can do with it.<br>
>><br>
>> I know there are a number of small footprint projects out there -<br>
>> looking for some advice on culling that herd.<br>
>><br>
><br>
> If you liked Read Hat or Fedora, check out Thincrust. One part of that<br>
> project is an "Appliance Operating System"; basically a minimal Fedora.<br>
> Thincrust is one of the many virtualization-focused projects that are a<br>
> part of Red Hat's Emerging Technology project.<br>
><br>
> <a href="http://www.thincrust.net/" target="_blank">http://www.thincrust.net/</a><br>
> <a href="http://et.redhat.com/page/Main_Page" target="_blank">http://et.redhat.com/page/Main_Page</a><br>
><br>
><br>
</div>And I have to bring up two others of mention. I've been running OpenVZ<br>
for a while now. Advantages over most of the others including Xen and<br>
VMware is that it is very light weight. With those other two you carry<br>
around a copy of the kernel for each virtual machine or container,<br>
whichever term you prefer. This guy,<br>
<a href="http://www.montanalinux.org/openvz-experiment.html" target="_blank">http://www.montanalinux.org/openvz-experiment.html</a> put over 600<br>
containers on a single system. Sure it had 32Gb of memory and dual,<br>
quad core processors, but that might give you an idea of how many the OS<br>
will support. The biggest limitation on OpenVZ is that the containers<br>
are limited to Linux only. There are templates for many of the distros<br>
in use today. Some of them quite small. I was very frustrated trying<br>
to make Xen work. I was never successful at building a working kernel,<br>
though the one in the distro worked, but was old.<br>
<br>
The all time simplest virtual OS I have used was the Sun VirtualBox. It<br>
installed easily and I was able to bring up XP and Ubuntu 9.10 without<br>
any problems.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
Jim.<br>
</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
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