[uml-user] FIRST STEPS WITH UML

[David R. <dr...@ry...>]

    Hi all,

    I am just starting to get interested in UML - it looks good for a 
project I am working on. I've been through a lot of the material on the 
UML home site, including the inspiring and technically indispensable 
David Coulson article on a UML-based pseudo-dedicated hosting service. 
In the end I decided to go with the approach in the "Debian Installation 
Inside UML HOWTO" ( http://uml.pimb.org/howto ) on the grounds that I 
had found it in the UML community site, that it was about Debian, and 
that it had been put together this last April. The instructions in that 
howto are quite straightforward, but I ran into trouble before I had 
gone very far.

    First, to my machine. I am running stable Debian 3.0 upgraded on 
line with security and other available modifications. The system uses 
the ext3 fs, and is very close to the base system, though plumped out 
with a number of packages including Apache. However, it does not include 
the X window system because the present installer cannot recognize my 
fancy graphics card - though I think that will be resolved in the Sarge 
release. Of course, the system has the Debian UML packages.

    I tested that the linux prog was working and, as expected, it went 
straight into a kernel panic. I set up all the files as the howto 
recommends , using sparse image files with an ext3 fs on rootfs and 
varfs. I wanted to do the installing as per the how-to's 3.1.2 
Disk-based Installation and used the command as listed there, but 
without the eth0 bit at the end. Everything seemed to go along nicely 
until it crashed with these lines at the end:

    mconsole ( version 1 ) initialized on /home/admin/.uml/uml_1/mconsole
    cramfs: wrong magic
    read_super_block: can't find a reiserfs filesystem on ( dev:00, 
block 16, size 4096 )
    read_super_block: can't find a reiserfs filesystem on ( dev:00, 
block  2, size 4096 )
    kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 62:00

    Can you give me some pointers on what this all means.

    TIA,

    dr