Directions in functionality for Fedora

Roy Bynum rabynum at ieee.org
Mon Feb 9 19:17:00 UTC 2009


I have been a member of this group for several years.  I have not 
responded or made a contribution because of time limitations. I have 
taken it for granted that the work that this group has been doing was 
improving the functionality and usability of Fedora, and for the most 
part that has been the case.  Recently, I have been trying to migrate 
off of the Windows environment required for my employment to a full 
Fedora Linux platform.  Several of the functions that I took for granted 
would be there seem to be missing now.

For example: If fc10.x86_64 on a new hardware platform.  I am unable to 
find support for mounting SMB shared file systems.  I have a NAS that is 
SMB based and I would like to do an automount through fstab.  
Unfortunately, fc10 does not support SMB file systems.  This was not a 
problem with earlier versions of Fedora, and the "mount" man pages still 
list "smb" as a supported file system.  My Thunderbird email directories 
are on the SMB NAS and I am unable to mount the share to be able to 
point to the mounted filesystem/directory from Thunderbird on my fc10 
installation. This keeps me tied to Windows.

Also, I have a dual boot system with different hard drives for the 
Fedora Linux and Windows XP.  I would like to do a full virtualization 
and run the Windows under a alternate profile from the same disk that I 
am using for the dual boot mode.  It appears that KVM, the current 
default virtualization system in fc10 does not support block devices the 
way that XEN did.
I have had a post on the fedora.forum for some time about the ability to 
utilize discrete block devices like hard drives as guest images and no 
one has been able to reply.  There is a lot of "hype" about the better 
"speed" from para-virtualization instead of full virtualization.  The 
published benchmark tests that I have been able to find indicate that 
para-virtualization tends to be better able to "prioritize" cpu 
utilization between the host and guest "systems", so that only some 
"systems" degrade which makes some appear to be faster,  while full 
virtualization tends force equal utilization so that all of the 
"systems" tend to degrade equally based on the number of host/guest 
"systems" are currently running. 

Please take this note as a favorable user who is concerned about the 
direction that Fedora appears to be going.  There needs to be increased 
diversity of functionality, adding new functionality and improvements 
while maintaining the legacy functionality and capabilities.  Pushing 
only the new at the expense of the old is a Microsoft mantra.  It should 
not be a Linux one.

Thank you for you time and patience in reading this long note,
Roy Bynum
rabynum at ieee.org
214-774-2923




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