Xen again
Hmmmm…. Not as easy as it looked. We’ve got a driver issue. My ADSL router is in the kitchen, and my server is in the attic, and I don’t like running cables. I get around this with wi-fi. Unfortunatly Xen’s modified CentOS 4 base install, which the VMs run on top of doesn’t support the wi-fi cards I use.
Now installing a driver on Linux is more involved than Windows. If the driver is supplied as a binary, it needs to match the exact version of the OS kernel. Not a huge problem if like Windows the kernel changed once every 4 years or so, but with Linux you could change the kernel every week if you really wanted it, and anyway, different distros ship with slightly different kernel versions.
To get around this, most drivers are supplied in source code, to enable you to compile it yourself to match your kernel. To do this, you need the kernel header files. You can download the kernel headers using the standard “yum install kernel-devel” method, but they’re the wrong ones! It wuldn’t take a lot of time to get around this, but I’m not going to bother, because I’m only going to run up against something else. I’m just going to install Debian Etch on the box and manually set up Xen tomorrow.
By gary | 22. Dec 2006 | Software | No Comments »