I followed Carson McDonald's knowledgeable lead and updated my fedora 7 install to Fedora 8 with yum. Others have reported problems doing this, but it worked perfectly for me, albeit taking a bit of time. Updating was right for me I think as I had previously installed F7 from scratch and had later installed many packages from the livna and fedora repositories. So it was handy to be able to update everything in one operation. The stats and notes for the yum update on my laptop were:

download 1.0 GB packages 1218 processing 20 mins installing 65 mins cleanup 25 mins

If you put your yum cache on a separate disk to one being installed to (even a USB hard disk), then things would probably proceed much more quickly. See /etc/yum.conf I have my yum cache on a separate partition to my relatively small root partition that I was updating. However I still needed around 810MB of temp space on /, which was used during the update (in addition to the 160MB of extra space used by Fedora 8). yum seems to disable suspend during the update, so don't think you can Ctrlz the yum window, suspend and resume later.

Right, so after 2 hours 5 days use, here is my review compared to Fedora 7. In summary a lot of effort has gone into this release, and it really does look very polished.

The good

• WPA wireless just works, on Intel 2200BG at least, and seems rock solid.
  Just type the password and you're connected to the net. Finally!
• wireless re-associates immediately after resume
• relatime is on by default to help hard disk performance and reliability
• Power usage is decreased a bit more compared to F7
• The character map applet now starts at your own language by default (rather than Arabic)
• file command gives the program name for core files again
• cal command highlights today
• sort -R command now does randomize in UTF-8 locales
• The Tira-2 kernel driver does not crash
• Ctrlleft and Ctrlright work again in vim within gnome-terminal
• I know this is subjective, but I really like the new icons and theme

The bad

• After about a week of use I noticed the following network manager/wireless issues
  • nm-applet crashes on resume rarely
  • I'm prompted for a WPA password 2 or 3 times when I resume when away from my access point
  • wpa_supplicant leaks 100KB/hour. [Update Dec 7 2007: This is fixed 5 days after reporting bug]
  • Every 6 seconds while not associated, the wireless stack uses a burst of CPU (scanning?)
  • I've 2 wireless access points in my network, and the network manager applet usually shows the (low) strength of the access point I'm not associated with
• My terminal font at least (monospace 8) was messed up, with the letters having too much space between them. I reset the DPI to 96 from 98 in, System → Preferences → Look and Feel → Appearance → Fonts → Details, and it looked fine again
• sound didn't work after the update. I had to go to, System → Preferences → Hardware → Volume Control → unmute PCM, for sound to work. Also a more meaningful name than PCM should be used
• If you unmaximise a window in metacity, subsequently doing a vertical maximise, also does a horizontal maximise
• If you toggle gnome-terminal fullscreen (AltF11) and back, then subsequently when trying to maximise the window, a fullscreen is done instead. Moving or resizing the window gets it out of this errorneous state
• "After a while" the window manager gets into a state where the bottom panel is ignored when vertically maximizing a window. (This is a gutsy bug also)
• less ignores window resize signals. (This is a gutsy bug also)
• If you turn off "Use sound to notify in event of an error" in power management settings, then all notifications are turned off (like battery low etc.)
• Still can't change to virtual terminals. They're just blank. [Update Dec 5 2007: After reading this Glen Gray informed me that adding a vga=791 parameter to my kernel in grub.conf or enabling LCD panel expansion in the BIOS would probably help. Doing either fixed the issue, and setting the vga parameter also means I see a nice tux logo on boot as well as console status messages on shutdown]
• yum-updatesd-helper runs periodically, consuming at least 100MB of RAM on my system which results in most apps swapping out and hence long delays when I return to my system as things are being swapped back in from the disk. I'm not even sure what this daemon is for, as the GUI update tools don't work for me. When I want to update I just run yum update. Anyway to disable this I ran chkconfig --del yum-updatesd

The ugly

• firefox 2.0.0.8 is horrendously slow at rendering justified text. Is this a side affect of the recently introduced text justify support in pango? [Update: This will be fixed in firefox 3 at least]
• Sound breaks after resume sometimes, with gnome-volume-control reporting "No volume control Gstreamer Plugins and/or devices found", requiring another suspend resume cycle to get it working again. [Update: As stated in the bug report, changing virtual terminals also gets sound working]
• About 1 in 15 resumes hang completely with no keyboard leds or anything working. This might not be fedora's fault though.
• As in Fedora 7, if the HDD password is enabled in the BIOS, reads from the hard disk fail after resume