Fedora 8 ROCKS!

I installed Fedora 8 RC on Monday night. I chose to backup my homedir and do a fresh install of Fedora 8 instead of upgrading my Fedora Core 6 install. I went this route mostly because my Fedora Core 6 was an upgrade of Fedora Core 5 which was an upgrade of Fedora Core 5 Test 1,2,3 Figured it was time to get out any cruft that may have been lying around.

The install went fairly well. I chose virtualization during install, then chose not to install Xen. But something I clicked on caused Xen to get installed anyway making it the default kernel at first boot. A quick edit of grub.conf fixed that.

I then rsync’d my homedir back over and logged in. Some of the applets didn’t start because I had forgotten to install them. Not a big deal,that was my fault not Fedora’s.

The only real problem I ran into was trying to turn on “Desktop Effects”, with my copied over homedir, the window borders wouldn’t show up when Desktop Effects was enabled. But if I logged in as another user with freshly generated configs it worked. So I threw away my configs and recreated my homedir and logged in to have GNOME create the basic entries, VIOLA! Desktop Effects worked (for about 40 minutes then a hard lockup of X) I should’ve figured as much as my previous attempts resulted in the same behavior: try #1 and try #2.

Another little problem is with NetworkManager 0.7 and static ips. In FC6, NetworkManager worked GREAT with my static ip. But the one in Fedora 8 INSISTS on doing a dhcp request. I know I can do with out NetworkManager as I’m not using wireless, but I’m fond of the vpnc menu in NetworkManager.

So far no show stopper problems. Fedora 8 has beautiful artwork, a cool new GNOME vnc client, and online desktop.
Fedora is like a fine wine, it gets better with age.

Kudos to the Fedora members for a fine release.