Slashdot Mirror
New Xen Linux Distribution
f5hacka writes "Four students at Clarkson University developed a new
linux distribution based on the Xen kernel. The distribution is called Xenophilia. Xenophilia is a derivative of Debian Linux and uses the new Debian installer to install its packages. Its homepage is available at http://cosi.clarkson.edu/xen/.
The distribution is available for download at http://mirror.clarkson.edu/pub/distributions/xenop hilia/"
There's a serious lack of information on that site. Like what the purpose of building yet another distro was, what need they were filling, other than learning to roll your own distro.
:\
More power to them. I personally use MacOS X and FreeBSD daily. I consider setting up a Linux machine from time to time (okay mods, I'm not setting up flamebait here), but it gets to be a real turnoff finding a more or less 'standard' distro that isn't a pain to set up. FreeBSD isn't elegant at all (PC-BSD seems to be stepping up to fill that need nicely), but at least it's the devil I know (pun intended).
Gentoo and/or Debian based systems at least seem to be the way to go these days, but the every-increasing number of distros bugs me. Don't want to pick a distro only to find it discontinued and have to load a new one.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
does it run on ms-windows??? cos if it's yet another virtual machine running on Linux then it's no good to me...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Why yet another distribution when everyone's favourite operating system already works, even on Xen - ``Of course it runs NetBSD!'' :)
e n.png 4 1 t ml
Some links:
* What does Xen look like - a screenshot:
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/hubertf-x
* Installation:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/howto.html
* General information on NetBSD/Xen:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/
* Live CD with Debian, NetBSD and FreeBSD:
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html#20050421_00
* Benchmarking:
http://www.iki.fi/kuparine/comp/xendom0/xendom0.h
- Hubert
Xen does have a lot of cool virtual machine features that you wont find in the standard kernel, or anywhere outside of a Z series machine. One of the nicest things that hasnt been meantioned here yet is the live migration of domains. That was what initialy made us look at xen - as a system to facilitate hardware upgrades of comodity servers without woring about the downtime it will cause your services. If you have all your services running as xen domains, you can migrate them to another physical computer on the same subnet, with no downtime of your network connections. Any users connected wont even notice the slight(200ms) pause in the domain as the last memory pages are swaped over. Another nice feature of xen is its amazing speed. In our tests at COSI, we found that there was only a 5-10% performace hit by running a database or webserver in a xen domain instead of nativly, completly destroying VMwares perfomance numbers. If you want more information about the performace aspect, you can find a couple of papers that have been written by other COSI members on the COSI webpage about xen.
Ed - debian installer hacker for Xenophilia