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Hello!
I would like to replace the distribution of my VPS which is currently running Ubuntu 8.04. The problem wouldn't be the remote installation itself but the differences between a normal installation and an installation in a Virtuozzo powered VPS.
From what I have heard about Virtuozzo by now, it seems that you can't install a new kernel nor change any kernel modules as the kernel is shared among all users on the real machine.
The problem for me is the entry point of the system. As there is no grub installed I can't instruct it to boot a specific kernel which in turn starts init. So how get's the system started?? Does it just look at the place where ubuntu stores it init scripts and executes that file. That would mean I could just delete everything on the root partition (which I cannot format) and install archlinux without a kernel and a bootloader? This could be done using a repair system that is offered by my hoster which mounts the normal root system in /repair ...?
Has anybody anything useful for me, experiences, instructions or any other hint?
Thanks in advance
schneida
EDIT: I have found a nice tutorial for installing Gentoo in such a Virtuozzo VPS (http://log.pardus.de/2008/04/gentoo-on-1-vserver.html) and also some threads about OpenVZ (which seems to be the base for Virtuozzo) here on the forum. But from what I've seen it seems impossible to install Arch because Virtuozzo uses a fairly old kernel (2.6.18) which is way older than the minimum kernel required by arch (2.6.27 -- http://www.archlinux.org/news/minimum-r … reased-1/). This really sucks, because the only way to get Arch working on such an old kernel seems to be recompiling the whole system, because everything depends on glibc which now depends on that new kernel. Anybody who knows a way around this?
EDIT2: There seem to be other users that had similar problems: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VPS_Repo ... Will have a look at that today.
EDIT3: Ok, installed Arch in a directory inside the ubuntu machine. Seems to be working so far in a chroot, but switching to Arch completly didn't work. Replacing the root dir with the files of the chrooted installation led to an "API-Error" when trying to restart the machine.
Final Edit: After I have found out, that I have access to Parallels Power Panel (which showed error messages during the boot process) it wasn't difficult to get Arch running. The problem was, that the init process of Virtuozzo was looking for /etc/init.d/network/interfaces which is provided by ubuntu normally. After copying that file over from the ubuntu installation and also copying some other files in /etc/init.d/ (like vzquota) Arch booted. Still, network didn't work so I added manual network configuration via ifconfig to /etc/rc.sysinit. Now everything works like a charm.
Last edited by schneida (2011-02-15 15:47:12)
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