Linux+NetBSD under Xen (or why `Insignia is good)

Published on: 2005-10-25

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Linux+NetBSD under Xen (or why `Insignia' is good)

2005-10-25T05:02:00

I have not yet lost faith in students. It's hard to motivate them, but many of them *do* get motivated. The 5'th semester CS students of GEC Thrissur seem to have been energized by Insignia 2005. Many of them are working hard to showcase the power of GNU/Linux and Free Software through interesting projects and demos. Anish has been struggling for the past few days trying to get NetBSD and Linux running simultaneously under the control of the amazing `Xen' virtualizing software. It finally worked yesterday! Anish's doc on NetBSD+Linux under Xen Vivek and Azhar are as usual running around trying to set up interesting hardware demos; Vivek has arranged a nice looking pendulum and is trying to do a simple demo using Phoenix. Running after dentists, Vivek got me a piece of Nitinol (a "shape memory" alloy) yesterday - the idea was to demonstrate the amazing `shape-restoring' abilities of this alloy by running some current through it under the control of the parallel port - but I have bad news for Vivek - the alloy is in its hard, `austenite' state at room temperature and has to be cooled to get it into its soft `martensite' state! It was amazing to see the stuff becoming as soft as putty when put into the freezer and getting back to its springy undeformable shape when brought once again to room temperature!