My laptop uses the Intel IPW2200 wireless adapter, and this stopped working after the upgrade to F8.

The output of

dmesg | grep ipw

is:

ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.2.2kmprq
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: ipw2200-bss.fw request_firmware failed: Reason -2
ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: -2
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ipw2200: probe of 0000:06:05.0 failed with error -5

The problem is caused by the fact that the udev files responsible for loading firmware in Fedora 8 are broken. Apparently, older versions of udev used /sbin/firmware_helper to load firmware

After upgrading from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8, CD's and DVD's were no longer detected on insertion into the drive, although they could still be mounted from the command line. I first noticed this issue after upgrading from FC6 to F7.

Apparently what's happened is that a file

/etc/hal/fdi/information/media-check-disable-DVDW_TS_L532M.fdi

is created during the upgrade. The effect of this file is to turn off automatic detection of media insertion. I don't know why this is necessary, but whatever the reason, having to manually mount CDs and DVDs is an inconvenience I'd rather live without.

Kernel 2.6.23 and ATI's proprietary fglrx driver 8.42 were released a few days ago, and you may have been tempted to rush out and upgrade. In one word, don't.

Although the display driver finally has AIGLX support and improved performance, it has no built-in support for the new kernel. It will mostly work, but you'll find that some programs will not start from the KDE or Gnome menu, although they'll start from the command line. So far, the culprit programs on my system are GoogleEarth, OpenOffice.org, and Mplayer. And I'm sure there are more.

For now, the most stable Kernel+ATI driver combination for me is 2.6.22_91 and ati-x11-drv 8.41 from the freshrpms testing repository. You can probably also use the one from livna.

Note: I'm assuming that you've already paired your mouse to your computer

FC6 has two startup scripts in /etc/init.d which make the Bluetooth mouse work — bluetooth and hidd — and these are both enabled by default. hidd is the daemon / program that's really responsible for connecting to the mouse — type man hidd for available options and commands — and the startup script of the same name simply wraps the command to fit into the usual command <start | stop | restart> format. It uses an environment variable HIDDARGS located in /etc/sysconfig/hidd.

HIDDARGS is set by default to "--server". However, this only serves to start the server (duh) and does nothing to actually locate and connect to the mouse. This requires either the hidd --search or hidd --connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX command (XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX is the address of the Bluetooth mouse. [I prefer to use the --connect command, as I don't want to connect to any random device that is found with the --search command.]

However, it seems that these commands cannot be passed to hidd simultaneously with the --server command.

I've been using Fedora since FC1 — I started using Linux with WGS 3.2, then RedHat Linux 4.2, and changed to Fedora with the transition from RedHat Linux 9 — and I feel I should share some of the pleasure and pain of fighting all sorts of hardware and software issues that I've had with installing, upgrading and configuring the operating system on the various hardware and software combinations that I've used.

This is not an installation guide, as there are very many good ones online. Rather, it'll probably be mostly of use to the person who has a slightly unusual installation.