Blog of Sylvain Le Gall

As a personnal project, i decided to setup a fanless PC which will host a Debian GNU/Linux Etch server and a Sid desktop. Well, to be honest, there is no real reason, apart the fact that i want to test Xen, just to see if i can do something with it...

First problem: Xen doesn't allow easy access of graphic adapter in host domain. (!= dom0) This is a real problem. I want dom0 to be set up with a minimal Etch environment. I don't want something that will need a lot of update. If, as i have decided to, one of the domU is my Etch server, i cannot make it rely on something less stable. Most of the time, the solution is to run a desktop in dom0, so there is no problem accessing graphical adapter. Since, i choose a minimal Etch, i really don't think it will be a good desktop environment. Another solution is to run a X server and to use VNC (through Xvnc) in domU. You can also use SDL, and even the framebuffer (but this option is not in the etch Xen release). I decided to do something different ;-) The big picture of my solution: dom0 is a X terminal and connect through XDMCP to domU. It is pretty straightforward, and works well:

• do a good xorg.conf file (i use vesa as a driver, for now) in dom0
• install gdm in domU
• activate XDMCP in gdmsetup (i do an "ssh -X domu.home.org" from a running computer with X, but things can be done in configuration file of gdm)
• add "x:23:respawn:/usr/bin/X vt7 :0 -dpi 100 -indirect domu.home.org" to dom0 /etc/inittab
• reboot and it works (or restart gdm in domU and "init 4 && init 2" in dom0)

Next step: Activate framebuffer and delegate most of the hardware to domU.