Subject: Mix and match guest distributions
From: "Roderick A. Anderson" <raanders@cyber-office.net>
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:19:26 -0700

Making another pass at some questions I've had over the years. I'm 
(re)looking at what distributions are used for the host and how to get 
other distributions in as guests.

Excellent information on the web site but I haven't been able to find a 
few things.

1. Is it possible to build a non-Gentoo based guest template?

    Say I have a CentOS or Ubuntu guest on one system and want _VERY_ 
similar bunches of guests on other systems.  Can I build a template of a 
guest to put somewhere (CD/DVD, USB thumb, network) and use as needed?

2. If so, how do I create the template?

    Is it as simple as building a tarball of a (non-running) guest?

3. And if I'm heading down a good path what would you say is the most 
stripped down distribution that could be used for the host?

    Yes disk space is cheap and I can and do turn off all the 
non-essential services but every time I check for updates there is a 
bunch of stuff I have to download because of the coarse granularity of 
the dependencies of so many packages. (Would that be a mouth full if I 
had to say it out loud?)

Thanks for your thoughts and input.


Rod
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