Fedora 14 Officially Released With New Features

[V!NCENT]

/yawn. Version bump release like the others.

Not saying there wasn't a lot of hard work put into the release, but from a desktop user's standpoint, I don't think there's anything exciting here.

Next time, maybe.

Ubuntu's version jump might not be that exciting, regardless of interest in Ubuntu.
Fedora on the other hand is the R&D Linux distro that shows end users the state of the art from the GNU/Linux kitchen. That's a bit more excitung to me

[spiritofreason]

Actually, if your desktop usage requires virtualization (E.g. running Windows VM), F14 w/ SPICE is a major improvement.

- Gilboa

Hm... you may be right. It looks like SPICE's primary focus is the environment with a remote virtualization server, though. For local VMs, does SPICE have features not already in VirtualBox?

At least it's a big improvement over the regular devices in qemu. It's always great to have multiple good options.

[AdamW]

Hm... you may be right. It looks like SPICE's primary focus is the environment with a remote virtualization server, though. For local VMs, does SPICE have features not already in VirtualBox?

At least it's a big improvement over the regular devices in qemu. It's always great to have multiple good options.

They're kind of hard to compare, they're sort of different beasts, really. VirtualBox is very application-y - it's an application you run and you can make VMs in it. That's really it. It's very focused on that single scenario.

We look at Fedora as having a virtualization framework or stack more than having a virtualization application. kvm, qemu, livbirt, virt-manager and SPICE are all part of that stack. Taken together they give you a very flexible virtualization environment which lets you do lots of neat Unix-y stuff - there's a whole pile of tools that come as part of libvirt which let you do introspection on virtual machines or virtual disks when they're not running, for instance, and you can do neat stuff like running virt-manager on one system connecting to another virt host via an ssh tunnel and controlling the VMs running on it (this is exactly how I handle my virtualized web and mail servers; they run on a headless server dedicated to hosting VMs, and I run virt-manager on my desktop machine to manage them). There are things that the RH / Fedora virt stack isn't capable of yet that VBox can do, however, and there's the classic simplicity/complexity tradeoff which means it's slightly easier to get up and running with the simpler option (VirtualBox).

[gilboa]

Hm... you may be right. It looks like SPICE's primary focus is the environment with a remote virtualization server, though. For local VMs, does SPICE have features not already in VirtualBox?

At least it's a big improvement over the regular devices in qemu. It's always great to have multiple good options.

Greatly depends on your usage case.
A couple of things:
1. Better headless / remote access support.
2. Better networking support (modes, performance, etc)
3. Better SMP support when ncpu >= 4. (Might not be a desktop issue, unless you're doing heavy compilation / calculation inside the VM).
4. IMHO, qemu-kvm snapshot is better suited for install/update-test-drop cycle (no need to store a copy of the VM disk image. In qemu's snapshot mode, changes simply do not get written to the image, unless you manually commit them).
5. Personal preference: I find it easier to manage/modify/etc qemu-kvm from scripts compared to VBOX's somewhat complex command line tools. (Again, might not be a desktop issue.)
6. Better support for RHEL clients. (VBOX has a ---major--- issue with idle detection on RHEL and CentOS.)
7. Better support for non-mainstream OS. (*BSD, ReactOS, Solaris, etc)
8. Better support for development releases. (Running VBOX on rawhide and/or Fedora beta release is... challenging...)

In general, I do agree that normal desktop users might find VBOX easier to handle as long as you stick to the old Windows-on-Linux template.
However, I doubt that Joe-six-pack is the average Fedora, which usually comes with a different usage case.

- Gilboa

[V!NCENT]

Vbox comes with a Fedora option backed in. Ran Haiku in it before. What's your problem?

Virtualising an OS in a thread is realy user friendly, but slow. Good to know that a descent framework isls in the making, even though Vbox is is FLOSS too...