Directions in functionality for Fedora
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(a)ieee.org
214-774-2923