The Love Shack

So the great guys over at Foresight Linux provide a number of pre-built images to allow you to take it for a spin. This is of particular interest to me since these images include Gnome 2.18. But, there’s a problem. Foresight provides disk images for QEMU, Parallels and VMWare, but not for my choice of VM’s, Xen.

Luckily, it turns out that running from the raw QEMU disk image is actually rather painless. The only thing that you have to do slightly differently on the Xen configuration is to specify the file as a device rather than a filesystem. In other words, in your disk = ['file:// line, you want to make sure that the 2nd paramater refers to a device, so instead of having something like sda1 you would want to just have sda.

The only other thing necessary is to get some way to log into the GUI to actually see what it's all about. To do that, you just need to make a couple of modifications to the gdm config file in /etc/X11/gdm/. In the [security] section, you’ll need to add a line that reads DisallowTCP=false and in the [xdmcp] section you’ll need to add Enable=true. After that just run gdm-restart and then connect to it directly via an XDMCP connection.

Personally, I use Xephyr for the job, so I just run Xephyr -host-cursor -terminate -query 192.168.0.199 :1 -screen 1024×768 and I’m done. (Obviously, you’ll want to substitute the appropriate IP there.)

Now you’re free to log in and hack away! (And I’d venture to say that you’ll have a much quicker and more responsive VM than either QEMU or VMWare can provide.)