All files on this site are provided without gaurantee or warranty. Use at your own risk.

Each download is a bzipped tarball containing four files:

• a xen guest filesystem
• sample xen configuration files to be used with xm create
• a small swap file

The naming convention of the download tarball is:

<distribution>.<distro-version>.<created-date>.img.tar.bz2.

For example debian.3-1.20061221.img.tar.bz2 contains

• debian.3-1.img
• debian.3-1.xen2.cfg (if you are using Xen 2)
• debian.3-1.xen3.cfg (if you are using Xen 3)
• debian.3-1.swap

All of the packages installed in the image will be the latest versions available as of the created date, which is in yyyy-mm-dd format.

1. Working installation of Xen version 2 or 3
2. The xen daemon (xend) must be running
3. Enough filesystem space to accomodate the uncompressed tarball (generally 1GB)
4. Enough unallocated RAM to run the xen guest (generally 128MB)

Each filesystem is configured to use dhcp. The *.xen.cfg also is also configured for dhcp. It is recommended that you first test the filesystem using dhcp if possible before attempting other networking parameters. Each download page has additional notes on networking that is appropriate for a particular distribution.

The root login is root/password. Root logins are disabled over ssh (which is the only daemon enabled by default). It is highly recommened that you change the root password immediately.

You will need to uncompress the tarball to a local directory and edit the *.xen.cfg file to point to the uncompressed image and swap file. Editing the config file will not be necessary if you expand the tarball to /xen/<distribution>, which is the default path used in the config file. For instance:

1. mkdir -p /xen/debian
2. mv debian.3-1.20050815.img.tgz /xen/debian
3. cd /xen/debian
4. tar -xvjf debian.3-1.20061221.img.tar.bz2
5. xm create debian.3-1.xen3.cfg -c

If all is well you will see the guest’s boot messages scrolling by.