So, I’ve wiped my test system with the intention of doing a tutorial on installing F16 + Xen. As part of this, I looked into installing a F16 domU with virt-install. When I tried it previously, I ran into this bug, and I ended up having to vnc into the dom0 and use virt-viewer to do the install.
Recently, there was some activity on the bug, centering around using “rd_NO_PLYMOUTH” to bypass the plymouth boot screen (the progress bar that scrolls across the screen, apparently – though why it’s in the installer I have no clue).
In any case, it seems to work – my revised install command of virt-install -p -r 1024 -n rawhide -f /dev/domU/rawhide -l http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/Linux/Fedora/releases/16/Fedora/x86_64/os/ -x "ks=\"http://hydrogen/~kyl191/ks/ks.php?hostname=rawhide\" rd_NO_PLYMOUTH serial" seems to do the trick – it gets into the console, at the very least.
That said, I get a nasty error using the partitioning scheme in my Kickstart file – grub2 wants a BIOS boot partition, a 1MB partition for storing files, and installation fails.
So, either I add the extra partition to the kickstart partitioning stanza, or I pass the installer an extra nogpt option when installing.
Guess which I chose. The BIOS boot partition makes no sense for Xen, because we’re booting with pygrub – we only care about grub.cfg, not what GRUB files are present or even if the bootloader is installed (which leads me to a question – can we get away with not specifying a bootloader to be installed in anaconda? I imagine not, since that probably means grub2 won’t be installed, but it might be something to look into.)
Though, it does seem to have completely fallen over – pygrub’s not returning any data on a (F14) Xen 4.0.2 system. xm create rawhide.cfg just returns an unhelpful “Error: Boot loader didn’t return any data!”, but trying pygrub directly gives a bit more detail – “RuntimeError: couldn’t find bootloader config file in the image provided.”
Trying with my F16 testbed now…
Also, apparently, radeontool, yum-pluginfastestmirror & ntpdate aren’t present in the F16 repos, so I have to remove them from my Kickstart file.