Xen is cooking up nice on Fedora Core 5. I didn't have any problem installing this on a Dell OptiPlex GX520, Pentium 4 (3.00 GHz), with 1G of RAM, Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express, Linksys Gigabit Network Adapter (Model No. EG1032,rev 10).
It was actually only a matter of minutes before I had everything running, which I think is the best way to learn about Xen. That is, first have a running system with multiple guest systems. And, for each guest account have networking functional. One quick note, it certainly helps if you have 1G of RAM, so that each guest account can use the minimum default of 256MB. Take a look at the FC5 Xen Quick Start Instructions for how it's all done.
What's missing in these instructions is how to ssh into a guest xm and run kde remotely. I'll detail here what worked for me.
Xen and remote KDE
From the computer you are sitting at, with a monitor,keyboard and KDE or Gnome loaded and running, you'll connect via ssh to the Xen guest system. But before you can do this, walk through the step 1, with the computer in front of you.
- Step 1. Allow magic cookies; otherwise, you may get the
following error:
Xlib: connection to ":1.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified
To enable magic cookies from the shell, issue the following commands.
$ MCOOKIE=$(mcookie) $ xauth add $(hostname)/unix:1 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 $MCOOKIE $ xauth add localhost/unix:1 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 $MCOOKIE
- Step 2. Create a new xterm. This will immediate take you to
vt12. To get back to your main KDE session type ctl-alt-F7. To
go back, again, to vt12 type ctl-alt-F12.
$ xinit -- :1 vt12
- Step 3. From vg12 type in the user and domain. The
example below assumes the guest vm is vm0.domain.com, and
the user to login in with is root.
$ ssh -Y -l root vm0.domain.com
- Step 4. Once you're logged into the guest system, all you have
to do is start KDE.
$ startkde
I didn't have to change anything for KDE, but Gnome takes a few tweaks.
Reference
You may want to reference Linux Tips (TIP 195)
Now, in my opinion, it's instructive to look at the FC4 Xen Quick Start, and hack away the working Xen configuration. The FC4 documentation goes into the mechanics of the process.