I am in the process of installing many distros on a single machine, and would like to have all of them available at all times (ie, no need to reboot to switch to another one). So, I’ve heard about PXES, which, if I understood correctly, should allow to do that.
Anyone with experience on this able to give some advise?
PXES is a thin client (it allow to boot Citrix, FreeNX, XDMCP, RDP, etc.) but over the network.
If you want to launch any distro at the same time, you will need a virtual machine. A good one is
QEMU. It
also have a launcher using a GTK interface, wich is called
QEMU Launcher.
at my job we use vservers for security context mostly, but it allows multple virtual machines to be running at once, they all share one kernel though so speed isn’t affected that much… the memory requirements are obviously higher the more simultaneous distros you have running, but you can start and stop a vserver from the host very easily:
http://linux-vserver.org/
i haven’t played with this on a desktop level, but i suppose setting up the distros to each export a vnc session of gdm instead of a normal xserver would work nicely for desktop level stuff.
PXES is as German says a thin client, what you need if you want to have them all available at the same time (running at the same time) is XEN, i think.
A thin client distro won’t help you much there.
I’d suggest that you try out Xen. Xen really allows you to run multiple OS on a single system. Then run XDMCP or so in your primary domain (i.e. the one with the keyboard and display) to connect to the others.
You can start, suspend, reboot the individual domains independently, which probably is what you want.