I'm not sure if this is possible with Xen or not, but it would be nice if there was an option to boot to an ISO that has been uploaded. I have a couple of different reasons, but at this time it would make it quite easy to install a distribution that is not currently available.

Unfortunately, unless that ISO happens to have a xen-built kernel and initrd, that's not possible.

If it /does/ have a xen or pvops-built kernel and initrd, you could probably hack something together with pv-grub as is.

There's always the directions at http://thegrebs.com/~michael/custom_howto/ if you want to build your own image locally then upload it

Yeah, I knew about that, but it didn't appear as easy as it was. I ran through it last night and was amazed.

Being able to upload an ISO would make it easier to install unusual things in a domU, like Solaris, and use distro repair tools.

The existing Finnix recovery distro excellent, but things in its recovery environment can be inconsistent -- like device nodes, LVM names, and binary compatibility -- vice the target distro.

Booting an ISO is easy, it's just that none of the ISOs are going to support booting into our environment, so forget it. It's much easier to boot an ISO locally on hardware or with something that does full virtualization (like VirtualBox or whatever), do the needful, and then lob the resulting filesystem up onto a Linode...

http://library.linode.com/advanced/migr ... -to-linode
http://library.linode.com/advanced/custom-distro-howto

-Chris