The easiest way to perform a finicky install of a guest OS under Xen - in particular on abandoned XenCommunity hosts or whenever stuck with the xm/xl toolstack in lieu of XenCenter - is to create a temporary config that leverages HVM (just for the setup, if your guest OS is PV capable or you will be performing such brain surgery later) and QEMU's device model to simulate a NIC, a cd drive and a vga card from which we can draw a framebuffer from totally unmodified installation media. Well, I guess without burning it or writing it to a stick it's more meta-media but I digress with pedantic indignity...

Do be sure to allocate enough resources to pull what is very often a quite bloated live environment off - I have smashed my head against Kali for what may have been years foolishly assuming it would not hang itself at random mid-birth simply because for reasons unknown and unconscionable its installer requires much more than 3GB to haul arse over the finish line.

Yes, this is one of my frustration therapy articles. Kindly bear with.

You may like iSCSI on fibre channel with LVM, I like corn dogs and fried chicken - let's prep with a sparse, raw file-backed destination image. 20GB images are quick enough to sling around a budget gigabit - your mileage may vary so strategise accordingly:

dd if=/dev/zero of=image.hdd seek=20480 bs=1M count=0

Now drop in install.conf:

name = "install" builder = "hvm" vcpus = 2 memory = 4096. vif = [ 'type=ioemu, model=e1000, mac=00:16:3E:29:99:99, bridge=eth0' ] disk = [ 'file:/var/xen/newvm/image.hdd,hda,w', 'file:/var/xen/newvm/install.iso,xvdb:cdrom,r' ] boot = "dc" vga = "stdvga" videoram = 64 vnc = 1 vnclisten = "192.168.0.10" vncdisplay = 0 vncpasswd = "verysecuresecret"

If you are working with a bizarre serial installer try replacing the video gunk with the following and rely on xm/xl console:

nographic = 1 serial = 'pty'

If you're remoting this beauty from a Windows box crack the seal on a fresh installation of RealVNC Viewer and pop in the ideally isolated, out of band, same, hardwired layer 2 network IP you forced the vnc session to listen on (default port 5900, may be higher if you are using vnc in production) for a fresh blast of Shit Just Finally Working.

Unless your xl create install.conf command spilled errors. Then you're on your own, sucka! As you are with figuring out how to gut and rearrange this into a working post-install config (hint: boot does the heavy lifting...). Mmm, productiony.