I have been having a real vacation for a change. I have tons of thing to do and some of them I have had to drop from my schedule completely. One of them is preparing the Party Management System for Assembly Summer 07. I have also taken some time to take it easy and some to have fun. I even dug up my dance mat from the basement and I have been taking more steps with Stepmania than with my hobby projects. It’s funny how aerobic becomes a perfect hobby for men when you add a computer and scoring.
First of all I have to apologize to the people behind Ubuntu installer. One of the seven or so installation options actually worked. Obviously the OEM (which I used in my previous post) and Live options are totally usable for my application but the alternative installation works. The Live option first makes the system slow and then crashes. It may be due to my display adapter being an ATI but I am not certain. Safe mode wasn’t too safe either.
Next thing to do was installing my favorite tools and Xen. I didn’t do that right away. First there was a problem with the newly created md and lvm arrays not coming up at boot time. A manual run made things run smoothly on subsequent boots. Next I had to find out why my mouse and keyboard didn’t respond after installation. I have a set that works over Bluetooth and quite soon I noticed that HID is not turned on by default and the Logitech BT dongle that usually gets an Oscar from being a completely good USB hub had gone dark. Turning on HID and pairing the devices worked. Having no secondary keyboard and no SSH server on made me scratch my forehead for a while. I summoned an uncursed USB keyboard of battery power and that was it. I run FUTURE and it worked like a charm. There have been reports from others that it works somewhat OK.
From my previous adventures in the kingdom of Xen I know that there is a package called ubuntu-xen-server somewhere in the universe and even a ubuntu-xen-desktop had been there. How wrong could I be! The package is named ubuntu-xen-desktop-amd64 in the amd64 repository and the server package is completely missing. All of these meta packages are a wee bit different. The desktop packages contain exactly the packages as the desktop packages. Why not making a dependency instead of copying? It is no wonder that these packages are still in the universe. I made a patch and a package.
Edit 2012-06-28: The links are long since expired as well as the packages. Eventually there became a way to install Xen on Ubuntu as Xen got easier. This post is here for historical reference.