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
Tags: lazyweb, woe is me, xen, xen-tools 5 comments