Fedora Test Days

What are Fedora Test Days

According to the Fedora Project's Wiki, Fedora Test Days are "an opportunity to exercise a completed, or in-development, Feature planned for an upcoming Fedora release. Each Test Day brings something unique and you're encouraged to join and share your ideas, tests, and results."

For Fedora 18, the complete schedule of Test Days can be found here. To know what Test Day is Today?, just go to this page.

Test Days happen (typically) on IRC in the #fedora-test-day channel on Freenode.

Fedora Tests Days and Xen

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Preparing the Host

It may sound obvious, but the first thing one needs to test how Xen works on a new Alpha/Beta release of Fedora... Is an actual host machine equipped with such a release of Fedora (18 Beta TC6 at the time of writing). This section quickly goes through the various steps needed to get there.

Obtaining the Install Media

During Beta phase, a reasonable image to download for your testing can usually be found here. (Note that, in all the subsection below, the 18-Beta-TC6 part is just a placeholder; all are valid URLs at the time of writing, but it should be changed accordingly, depending on when testing happens.)

DVD or Live Images

Full DVD installer images are available here:

   https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/18-Beta-TC6/Fedora/

While LiveCD images can be fetched at this url:

   https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/18-Beta-TC6/Live/x86_64/

PXEboot

in a PXEboot environment, kernel and RAMfs for the installer can be downloaded via the following commands

   wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/18-Beta-TC6/Fedora/x86_64/os/images/pxeboot/initrd.img
   wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/18-Beta-TC6/Fedora/x86_64/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz

Installing the Host

Installing and Configuring Fedora

This should happen in the usual way you install Fedora. Given the very specific purpose of this installation (testing running VM with Xen on Fedora), anything you can find in the Categories Category:Host Install and Category:Host Configuration on this Wiki can be considered useful.

Also, the Fedora Host Installation (still on this Wiki) contains some more specific information about the subject, especially useful post-install Xen-related configuration tips.

Installing Xen

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Installing libvirt & C.

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Using a Live CD

A LiveCD can be used as well. Although probably less powerful as a testing environment, it may turn out to be very convenient, in case you don't have any spare hardware handy. Instruction on how to create a Fedora Live CD can be found [XXX here].