I'm interested in setting up a Linode. However, I'd like to run Mandriva. Linode does show some very old Mandrake releases on the list of available distributions. Obviously I couldn't run one of those, it'd be terminally unsafe, but - since Linode is supposed to give you complete control over the node - does anyone know if I could simply install the old copy of Mandrake and then do an in-line upgrade to a recent, supported release?

I can handle the actual process of doing that, I just want to know if the level of access available on Linode makes that possible. Thanks.

(Also, Linode, why no new Mandriva releases on the list? Come on :>)

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Adam Williamson

With Linode, you can do absolutely anything you need to. Anything. Period. It's like having a VM running in VMWare on your own machine. Completely isolated+root access.

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Jay Faulkner
http://oldos.org

I think this wiki page would really help you.
LINK:

http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/Cu ... stribution


Regards
Hareem

Jay: thanks. However, I see on the front page a blog post about how to run a custom kernel on a Linode, suggesting it's not a 'common' thing to do. I guess I'd have to deal with that, to install anything but the 'standard' Linode kernels?

hareem: thanks a lot, but...er...for a complete newbie-to-linode, that looks somewhat...incomplete . I can't really make head nor tail of it as written. It just seems to tell you how to create a couple of dev nodes and set up a tty, which is fine, but it's not installing a custom distribution, it might be step 1 in installing a custom distribution but it's missing steps 2 through 20

thanks again guys!

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Adam Williamson

Don't know anything about Mandriva, but isn't it as simple as installing the Linode supplied OS and then upgrading it via the OS's package management utilities.

It's this simple for Debian. Assume the same for Mandriva.

I don't think you need to go down the custom kernel route, unless you have some specific reason to do so.

kangaby: I may be reading it wrong, but from what I've looked at, it seems like Linode handles bootloaders somewhat differently than usual, and it only works transparently like that on one of the supported distributions. I suspect if I installed Mandrake 9.2 on a Linode and then tried to upgrade it to a recent release, it might not be able to boot the kernel, unless I do that custom kernel stuff. Does anyone have any actual experience with running a not-officially-supported distro on a Linode?

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Adam Williamson

Your linode will ignore all kernels within your file system (like those installed by your package manager) and use the kernel you select in your configuration profile. This should not cause a problem for your distro.

FWIW, I took the existing Slackware image and upgraded it two minor releases with out issue

This is almost true. The rub is that the tools included in an old distro may not support modern kernels very well.

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The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world.
-- seen on the net

Also, http://thegrebs.com/~michael/custom_howto/ is more up to date then the wiki page is if you wanted to try building a Mandriva image locally.

Thanks for all that, guys. Yes, SteveG / mwalling, that's what I'm worried about: the thing is that Linode won't have any modern Mandriva kernels available for use, and a modern Mandriva will not work right with an ancient Mandrake kernel, or a kernel from some other distribution.

In any case, though, I realized it's become a bit academical: as I want to use U.S. affiliate programs without paying U.S. taxes, I'm not allowed to have any kind of 'operation' in the U.S., which apparently includes hosting my server there. So I can't use Linode for my purposes, as it's based in the U.S. :\. I'll have to look for some kind of provider here in Canada. A shame, because Linode seems like a great system. Still, thanks for the input, and I'll keep it in mind for other projects, and hope it will be of use to others!

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Adam Williamson

Sorry our tax system sucks. We're working on a bugfix.