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I just don't understand

30 December 2007 21:50

Whilst I'm very pleased with my new segmented network setup, and the new machine, I'm extremely annoyed that I cannot get a couple of (graphical) Xen guest desktop guests up and running.

The initial idea was that I would setup a 64-bit installation of Etch and then communicate with it via VNC - xen-tools will do the necessary magic if you create your guest with "--role=gdm". Unfortunately it doesn't work.

When vncserver attempts to start upon an AMD64 host it dies with a segfault - meaning that I cannot create a scratch desktop environment to play with.

All of this works perfectly with a 32-bit guest, and that actually is pretty neat. It lets me create a fully virtualised, restorable, environment for working with flash/java/etc.

The bug was filed over three years ago as #276948, but there doesn't appear to be a solution.

Also, only on the amd64 guest, I'm seeing errors when I try to start X which mention things like "no such file or directory /dev/tty0". I've no idea whats going on there - though it could be a vt (virtual terminal) thing?.

The upshot of all this is that I currenly have fewer guests than I was expecting:

skx@gold:~/blog/data$ xm list
Name                                      ID Mem(MiB) VCPUs State   Time(s)
Domain-0                                   0     3114     2 r-----   1180.6
cfmaster.services.xen                      1      256     1 -b----      1.0
etch32.desktop.xen                         2      256     1 -b----      1.4
etch32.security-build.xen                  3      128     1 -b----      1.4
etch64.security-build.xen                  4      128     1 -b----      1.4
sarge32.security-build.xen                 5      128     1 -b----      1.0

| 5 comments

 

Comments on this entry

icon James at 22:43 on 30 December 2007
Use /dev/xvc0 instead of /dev/tty0. Is fiddling /etc/inittab and /etc/securetty to use this within the remit of xen-tools? Instead of using VNC, have you tried using XDMCP? You can then use gdmflexiserver --xnest to log in.
icon James at 22:45 on 30 December 2007
Hmm, I missed the bit that it was X complaining about /dev/tty0, no idea what's going on there.
icon Steve at 22:58 on 30 December 2007

Thanks for the comments! Yes xen-tools will already fiddle with xv0/tty0 if you tell it to - but that doesn't seem to be helping here.

xdmcp was going to be my fallback plan, but given that X won't start I can't use it ..

icon Liam Bedford at 10:20 on 31 December 2007
This is fixed in tightvnc, can you use that instead? http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=281767
L.
icon Steve Kemp at 11:53 on 31 December 2007

Thanks a lot Liam!

Using tightvnc it all works perfectly. So I can now login via either VNC or XDMCP+XNest.