Fedora KVM not ready for Prime Time.

[Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX N2469R]

I installed Saturday's rsync Rawhide 64 and took KVM
for a test drive as recently suggested.

The first hiccup was not finding anything virtual in the
System manu (under Gnome).  "kvm" from the slell
prompt didn't do anything either.  OK, so it is in
another menu.

Once I started virt-manager I could find no way to
create a vdisk with an arbitrary path name (e.g.,
a file on a mounted partition with sufficient free space).
So I settled for the default.

I then installed XP Pro in the virtual machine.  The
virtual machine stopped instead of rebooting as
expected.

I then loaded an app I would like to run under a virtual
machine:   OSWeather+VS-20090812-0046.msi.  This
app uses a USB port (doesn't everything nowadays?)
to read data from their weather station.

I poked around the virt-manager menu structure but
could find no mention of USB ports, or even serial
ports!

A little necromancy Googleing unearthed the
-usbdevice option to qemu.  I tried running
qemu with various command lines.  The good news is that
qemu reported capturing the Oregon Scientific device.
The bad news is that virt-manager did not see this process.
Connecting to qemu with vnc yielded an inert black screen
that exited when I killed qemu.

So the Fedora virtual machine is practically a pre-usb pc,
four to eight usb porta short of a full deck.

-- 
Chuck Forsberg    caf at omen.com   www.omen.com   503-614-0430
Developer of Industrial ZMODEM(Tm) for Embedded Applications
   Omen Technology Inc      "The High Reliability Software"
10255 NW Old Cornelius Pass Portland OR 97231   FAX 629-0665