Daniel Hokka Zakrisson wrote: > Roderick A. Anderson wrote: >> 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? > > Sure. -m template is not at all Gentoo specific. I thought so but I found no examples. This is great. >> 2. If so, how do I create the template? >> >> Is it as simple as building a tarball of a (non-running) guest? > > I'd use cpio as it does hardlinks correctly, but yes. If you have a minute or two could you refresh my memory. Hardlinks "correctly" how? Heck I'll dig into the man pages later and see if I can figure the nuances of tar verses cpio. >> 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?) > > I run several CentOS systems with root filesystems <2GB, but to each > their own. Any tricks you can suggest on getting a minimal CentOS(/Linux-Vserver) host install? TIA, Rod --