The Xen 3.1 RPMs are pre-built RPM packages for a number of different Linux distributions. For each distribution there are three binary RPMs as well as a complete source RPM (SRPM). These RPMs can be used as input to the rpm tool to install Xen itself and all the necessary tools (xen-3.1.0*), as well as a Xen-enabled Kernel based on kernel.org 2.6.18 (kernel-xen-2.6.18-3.1.0*), e.g. # rpm -ivh xen-3.1.0-1.*.rpm # rpm -ivh kernel-xen-2.6.18-3.1.0.*.rpm Depending on your install, you may need to first install addtional rpms (one common rpm not installed by default on a number of distrbutions is bridge-utils for example). You may also need to remove conflicting rpms in some cases (e.g. some older distributions may have installed rpms with a conflict against a kernel as recent as 2.6.18). Note that when you install kernel-xen-2.6.18-3.1.0*, modules are installed and an initrd is built. However no new boot entry is automatically added to grub.conf; instead you need to do this manually. Typically this means adding an entry of the form title My Distro with Xen (2.6.18-xen_3.1.0) root (hd0,0) kernel /xen-3.1.0.gz module /vmlinuz-2.6.18-xen_3.1.0 ro root=/dev/ module /initrd-2.6.18-xen_3.1.0.img ... obviously replacing with the name of your root device. If you plan to develop with Xen, download and install the xen-devel-3.1.0-1.* RPM to get the header files and development libraries. If you want the complete source for reference or to rebuild, download and install the SRPM (xen-3.1.0-1.src.rpm).