Fedora 8 Released (a Few Days Ago)

[Gumballl]

Nope, the balloons and confetti did not fall out of the sky with this release, however it is supposed to be "better" than F7. I guess I'll have to wait and see.

I blew away an installation of FC5 on my laptop and supplanted it with F8 with a full install. While attempting to get system updates (post-install), the process froze on me. I think I tracked the problem down to having both my wired and wireless network chip-sets enabled at the same time. I disabled the latter during a reboot (using the h/w switch), and then all worked fine. Later, I had trouble launching Administration GUIs, but a reboot solved that. Btw, I seen this same problem on other Fedora releases too.

Anyhow, everything seems working at this point. I've gotten HTTPd, SSHd, and ddclient (DynDns client) running well. I will give Amarok and the other multimedia players a spin today.

P.S. Fedora 8 can be obtained here: http://fedoraproject.org

Edited November 11, 2007 by Gumballl

[autonomous_unit]

I just installed Fedora 8 on my 4 year old thinkpad, and see a nice reduction in power consumption (at idle) which will make the battery last longer. Previously, it idled around 11-12 watts on battery with the LCD backlight at a dim setting. Now, it idles at 8-9 watts.

Also, the efforts in Fedora to address more hardware "quirks" have finally paid off, in that the ACPI behavior seems right out of the box for me, including suspend and hibernate hot-keys. I used to always have to add my own customizations whenever I installed a new Fedora. To be fair, some of these quirks improvements appeared recently in Fedora 7 updates. Only the reduced power consumption is completely new for me.

They've also added the "ath5k" wireless driver, but I find that it doesn't work for me yet with my internal atheros ABG card, at least for my WPA network which is the only way I can test it now. So I still have to use an add-on madwifi driver build.