Hi all,

I am thinking about installing SUSE 10.0 in a desktop machine. After reading Mick Bauer's article in April 2006 Linux Journal, I am intrigued by Xen, but it seems that some consider this unstable. Does anyone have any experience using Xen?

I am particularly interested in the possibility of having SUSE as my primary OS and perhaps Mandriva 2006 and/or MEPIS 3.4-2 as virtual machines. (If it helps, I have a 40 GB hard drive, about 2 GB of user files, and 1.5 GB RAM.) Does anyone know if this would be possible? I am not quite clear about whether Xen can currently only virtualize certain OS's, possibly not including Mandriva or MEPIS. If it helps, I'd gladly settle for some easily installed Debian derived distro other than MEPIS.

But I am not clear whether I (as an unadventurous and not very able computer user) would be able to install alternative OS's to virtual machines using the fabulous installer on the MEPIS live CD, or the installer in the Mandriva CDs. Any advice?

TIA, Peufelon

From what I've read on using Xen, if you restrict your OSs to *nix types (no micro$oft windows) it should work. You will need to partition ram into a minimum of 256M for each OS.

I haven't tried it yet. Getting the new box about Wednesday next week. Then I will give it a try.