Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@rek.tjls.com> writes:

> It occurs to me that there is one other difference between your systems
> and mine: I use a serial console.  If you can, it might be worth while
> for you to try that.

    This may be noteworthy.  I (being presently clueless about xen,
but interested in it) took a brief pass at getting Xen up and running
on a crash box of mine.

    The one attempt I made at booting Xen didn't "just work" -- my
monitor reported that the sync frequency was out of range after I
typed "boot" at grub.  Other external indications seemed to say that
the CPU was doing something (e.g. some disk I/O blinkenlights).  I
didn't get a network out of this machine from what I could see.  It's
using a crappy realtek card, and for all I know about Xen, it needs to
support my network card at some level itself rather than using the
host OSes driver -- certainly, the Xenolinux live CD is *not* built
with realtek support.  I will note that I did *not* check my DHCP
server to see if it had issued a lease under a different address than
expected; I was exhausting my fiddle time and didn't think to check.

    Upon hitting the reset button and letting the machine boot
normally, it fsck'd the disk, which seems to indicate that the kernel
had actually booted, it just didn't have any obvious means of talking
to the rest of the world.

    I'll try the serial console when I next find time to work with it.